Can we have Old Style Forum back please.!!!. . . . This one sucks.!!

[Lee Roberts]

Re: My Health

Thank you to those of you who have shown concern towards the things I talked about in my last post here, as promised you can find an update below. If I have offended any one by talking about myself, then I apologise as it was not intentional.

So I’ve been for all the tests they want to do, been bounced around the system and finally have some of the answers as to "what’s up" with me.

Turns out I have psoriasis; this triggered the next revelation "psoriatic arthritis". While all this has been going on it turns out I’ve also had an underactive thyroid, we knew this when I last posted on this thread but things have become clearer now, I think I’ve had this since I was about 18 as I’ve always been 5ft 11 and 17 1/2 stone with no real explanation for it. They say I should be between 9 1/2 to 12 1/2 stone, what they are saying is that because my thyroid has been under active I’ve put all that weight on but now that the med’s are bringing my thyroid back into balance its reversing the effect and accounts for the weight loss. So that is a positive thing to happen at least, though there is more on the weight loss, continued below.

The thyroid thing is great I’ve never felt better lol; I’m currently 13 stone 7, gone down from a 38" waste to a 34. The sad news is though, I’ve got allot of upper body muscle loss mostly in my arms and shoulders. My knee is still quite bad and shot at, I’ve got quite a bit of muscle loss in my upper right leg as well, I think allot of the loss has come from not being able to use parts of my body because of the pain. I’ve always been a lump don’t get me wrong but I’ve always been a strong lump and a very able person when it has come to physical things. You know when you see that guy? who grabs a washing machine out the back of a transit?, chucks it up onto his shoulder and “boy’s-it-off” till he gets to the front door, well that used to me.

Let’s talk about pain.
I tried to live with it as much as I could, however it got to the point where I couldn’t even turn over in bed without extreme pain in my upper body, shoulders, my collar bone more than anything, it was like being hit with a hammer, right on the end of my collar bone. I did a little test with pain killers and it turned out that pain was right in my shoulder but had an echoing effect on my collar bone that made it feel like it was in my collar bone.

Anyway I had to give in, everything was shutting down and I was really starting to struggle. It’s weird because what I noticed was, say like I needed to go and drain the “bishop”, one part of my brain was saying “go on then, off you go” while another part was actually overriding those thoughts and telling me not to get up because it was going to hurt, I would find myself sat there, talking to myself mentally, I can see the funny side of it now but my Mrs came in a few times and asked me what I was doing, lol, I would have a slight rocking motion about me and would be staring at nothing.

After a few times I noticed myself what was going on, what I was doing, I was building up the courage to actually just get up and face the music, so then I just started overriding those thoughts and said no, get up, you’ve got to. Mind Games!

It’s a bit crazy really when you look at it, things like going to the loo or getting up to walk across the living room to the table at dinner time, are normally just spontaneous actions that you do without even thinking about it. It’s a real eye opener to what we sometimes take for granted and what others go through, day in, day out.

So anyway, much to my disliking I went to the doctors and started taking pain killers 3 times a day, 1200mg a day, this helped no end and I’ve been able to relax a little since.

My current situation.
Since the 4th I’ve now started my medication for the arthritis, they said that it will take a good 3 months for these meds to start working as although they are very powerful they take this long to start showing signs of working. Overall I’ve received a decent service, I did need to make two phone calls to get the ball rolling with regards to the arthritis meds, I was waiting for the specialist nurse to send me an appointment, however 5 weeks past the original quote of 8 weeks max, I felt it was time to give them a push, two weeks later I had my appointment and was starting the meds.

Basically the things I have wrong with me are all classed under the same umbrella; they are Autoimmune Diseases, from the wiki: “are the result from an abnormal immune response of the body against substances and tissues normally present in the body (autoimmunity). The treatment of autoimmune diseases is typically with immunosuppression—medication that decreases the immune response”.

There are a little over 100 different types of autoimmune disease, since finding out what is wrong with me I’ve been doing allot of reading up, I’m currently working my way through a book called “The Immune System Recovery Plan”, it’s by a lady doctor in the USA called Susan Blum. Susan has also suffered from autoimmune diseases herself, is lucky enough to be in a position to make a difference and also practises something called Functional Medicine.

If your remotely interested then get the book (I won’t spoil it for you here) because it is worth the read, even if you don’t have anything wrong with you at the moment, that you know of, it points out some interesting things about the food we eat and the body’s reaction to that information.

One short explanation to allot of the autoimmune diseases we know about is something called “leaky gut syndrome”, what Susan explains in the books is that many symptoms and diseases are caused by the immune system reacting to germs, toxins or other molecules that have been absorbed into the bloodstream via a porous bowel. In her book she gives many examples of how Functional Medicine helped to fix a wide array of problems in different people, she also talks about the current medical system and medicine. Something that I can say is true, is that, out of the handful of people I’ve been to see (doctors and so on) NOT ONE of them has asked the question WHAT IS THE CAUSE of the problems I have, true to what she talks about in the book, they have all diagnosed my SYMTOMS and true to form prescribed medication to deal with those symptoms, the problem with such medicines is that they don’t fix the REAL problem.

So coming back to my arthritis problem (as it’s the biggest for me at the moment), the med’s they have put me on for this are actually going to start suppressing my immune system. Hang on a minute! how can suppressing my immune system fix the CAUSE of my problem? How is it right that you would shut down a MAJOR function in the body, more concerning the one of the single most important assets the body has for defence...

The answer is, it WON’T “fix” my problem of psoriatic arthritis. When you think about it, above they told us that, it will take about 3 months for the effects of the meds to really show signs of “working?”, is that because shutting down/suppressing the immune system is actually quite an extreme thing to do?.

I’m taking the meds they have given me; however I am also getting ready to start an elimination diet. This diet will see me removing the different types of food categories from my diet, then after 3 weeks I will slowly be introducing them back in, one at a time. This will allow me to monitor my reaction to things like dairy, I will be looking at how my body reacts, how some food information makes me feel and so on.

If we pop back to my thyroid problem for a second or two, as you probably know, food contains protein, unfortunately for my thyroid and when the immune system is over active, the immune system can also start attacking the body and one of the things it can attack, is the thyroid. It does this because your thyroid also contains protein, it’s not quite the same protein but when the immune system is on such “high alert”, those proteins look the same, the result can be that it starts to attack the thyroid because it “thinks” it is a foreign object in the body.

We can’t blame it, that is the purpose of the immune system, what we can do though, is reduce the amount of nasty’s sneaking through the gut wall, giving the immune system a chance to calm down and relax.

From most of the above, you should now be able to see how my problems may be connected to the same cause, eventually the hope is that I will identify what food is no good for me and remove it from my diet and begin repairing my leaky gut problem. I am hoping that I can use the meds to suppress my immune system enough that life is better for me in the short term but also while I do the “self discovery” thing regarding the food and elimination diet. Eventually I hope that my body will be able to cope with my conditions on its own and that I won’t need to spend the rest of my life on pain killers and suppressive medicines developed in the 19th century.

At this moment in time, I feel better than I have for awhile now. Although they said the meds for the arthritis won’t act as a pain killer, since I started taking them on the 4th, I’ve only needed to take one 500mg tablet of pain killer since then, clearly this medicine has started to help me already even though I’m not at the full dosage yet (slow build up each week, for 4 weeks). This great because I really didn’t want to be on painkillers, there is somewhat of a match between when things started to go “wrong” for me and a time in my life when I was taking pain killers for something else, for many weeks. I don’t know for sure but I think taking the pain killers at that time may have been the cause of my leaky gut, as pain killers are known to strip the lining of your stomach and so on.

So I am in a better place now, true, my journey has only just begun, however it will be one that changes my life for good and forever.

Thanks,
Lee