I have been asked by HU to be part of the project to of stories of people who use HU daily. They have kindly asked for me to be part of that project. They asked for a photo. I have produced one, attached, which shows my left ankle a few minutes ago and the same ankle take March 2016!
The right hand side was taken when I was on methotrexate, and as you can see it didn't work. Since then I adopted the Paddison program approach to healing the gut, and with determination & focus, eventually healing my rheumatoid arthritis. My last tablet of methotrexate was 1st July 2017. So the left hand side photo I took a few minutes ago.
This is the first time I have produced a before and after photo, and I am blown apart by it.
Written by
andyswarbs
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Considering I had aggravated RA before I started the MTX it is amazing to see one of the possible side effects of MTX, according to NICE, is aggravated RA.
Its very odd but not unheard of to treat a problem with a medicine that can create it. It happens with herbal, homeopathy and orthodox medicines. Some people get relief from the treatments though.
Not sure the pharmaceutical company/ies that produce methotrexate would want to be compared with homeopathy etc. But your point holds true. Mtx works by suppression of the immune system, so what happens when you take it depends on so many things, including the state of your immune system and what immune challenges your body is subject to. I was unable to walk more than a few feet and so I was largely confined to moving between bed, bathroom and sofa: this gave me one advantage of not being so confronted to the colds and flus of other people who live locally etc. Not much of an advantage, perhaps...
for instance cardiac treatment drugs made from digitalis (foxglove) can both cause cardiac arrest and death if use by a lay person, as well as and treat cardiac problems when administered in the right dose. There is said to be a plant to heal every ailment both herbalism, homeopathy and medical drugs were based on the properties in the plant. Trouble with orthodox medicine is they are now using generics and man made synthetic drugs, in my view its why so many side affects.
I find your story interesting but incredibly hard to believe.
I have been reading on these sites for many years and read many of your posts on here and on other sites.
I just don't buy your story mainly because you don't have anything to backup your claims.
Can you say who exactly in HU invited you to tell this never ending story that is a put down on people who eat an egg.
You was a crippled person and now can walk up hills without effort. And all this because you gave up cheese.
You say I don't have anything to back up my claims! What about paddisonprogram.com/wp-cont... which is a PDF showing much of the science behind Paddison Program, citing nearly 150 research papers. Why not print a copy and take it to your rheumatologist.
In the face of many people who have tried dietary changes to no real benefit, why should I be somehow magically different?
Of course it was not just giving up cheese. That is exactly where people go wrong. 100's of websites and pages and books talk about just change one magical thing in your life and all will be rosy. That is not what happened.
What happened was that, through the paddison program (and it could have been other programs perhaps) I learnt to listen to my body and understand what foods caused reactions in my body. That is a hard lesson to learn when you are in severe pain, drugged up to the hilt and have brain fog and all the rest of the symptoms. The food is also incredibly boring. There is no salt, no pepper, no seasoning whatsoever. These are bland foods with no variation for days if not weeks on end.
The ONLY motivation is feeling the slightest improvement in terms of reduction in pain. But when you realise a few days later that you are not in so much pain, well that is a good motivation. When a few more days go by and you are in even less pain that motivation only increases.
The key to the learning is reducing the food intake to a minimum and yet as nutritionally complete as possible. That in itself is difficult to do! Then when you are taking in minimal foods beginning to test foods out one by one, carefully logging each. I did my logging in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet I have not touched since that time. Here is one summary tab of it
where you can see the foods I have tested, what I considered safe and so forth. The top header row is colour coded, so green are foods that I felt very important to test sooner and red I was happy to postpone. This is just one view of what I did in my spreadsheet. The entries in this spreadsheet reflect my body and how it interacted with foods. I created this spreadsheet for my personal benefit. No-one else has a spreadsheet like it. (I am a spreadsheet nerd!)
As an aside, I was persuaded to consult a diviner, to whom I sent a lock of hair. She replied with her report on what foods I should and should not eat. Because my first consultation proved successful I consulted her again 6 months later for emotional divining. I don't have to justify the merits of divining, I don't even have to believe it myself. But surprisingly her list matched the results I was finding. So at the very least this gave me more confidence in my approach.
Yes, I was a cripple, at least emotionally and walking was indeed pretty horrible. I was not as bad as my sister who is housebound with arthritis and has been in a wheelchair for several years now. She has adopted some of my ideas, but hers would be an even bigger uphill battle than mine. She does not do her own shopping and so relies on what other people buy. As such, because I don't live close enough to help her I can only feel happy that she has at least improved her life somewhat.
I was not a cripple for years. I have had arthritis for over 40 years and for much of that I led a fairly normal life, held together by drugs. However arthritis blew up in my face from Easter 2015 onwards. My wife blames it on the death of our daughter. Six months or so later CRP went from near normal (less than 5) to maximum of 177.
Whilst being a couch potato I watched Breaking Bad, all 8 series around 8 times back to back (though I was skipping a lot by the time I got to my sixth play through!) That is a lot of hours in front of the TV!
To help me my wife took me to Picardy for a holiday, thinking that might help at least emotionally. We rented a private place and we ate foods from an organic store called BioCoop. This was before I started the Paddison Program. We went out to look at some chateau or other. I got out of the car and said no, I cannot walk because it felt like shards of glass under my feet. The rest of the holiday was pretty well spent in our holiday home watching DVDs. I may just as well have been at home!
One photo I have from that holiday is very poor quality. I am laid out on a comfortable sofa with an array of cushions under different parts of my body in an attempt to give me some respite from the pain. I was wearing shorts and there are two rather inflated legs stuck out of the bottom.
Removing rheumatoid arthritis from my body has done nothing for the osteo arthritis. I was told when I was 23 that I had the joints of a 55 year old with osteo arthritis. I am now 66. My knees click. My right elbow and wrist are very weak. A CT scan of my right elbow says it is bone on bone. One knee has no cartilage. Both knees click.
But I function. Yes I can walk. I cannot run. I can do limited dancing. Given the damage in my body I may find some of my joints packing in at some stage. I am fortunate in one thing, at least my joints are my own since I have, as yet, had no operations to replace my joints.
Healing my body was the hardest thing I have ever done, bar none. There is no magic potion. It is hard work that requires dedication, persistence and so much more. Without exception there are no two people who succeed on the Paddison program that end up eating the same foods.
Healing is about the process. It is about understanding nutrition, it is about listening to your body. It is about patience. It is about digging deep.
For two months around August 2016 my recovery stalled. I was convinced that I needed oils and so I had started adding some back in. For example my wife bought me dark chocolate as a treat. Also I would cook with olive oil. Coconut oil was in the press for being helpful and I had some of that. That was a difficult time for me. I dug deep. I reviewed all the foods I was eating trying to work out what was causing me more problems. Around mid-September out of total frustration I stopped the oils. From that moment my progress towards health began again. That was a magical moment!
No, it's not just about giving up cheese! If my story is published by HU, then I will post a link here.
Thank you Nellie2. I continue to improve, slowly but surely. I watched an interview between Clint Paddison and Carl Reader which came out a couple of days ago. paddisonprogram.com/all-abo...
One of the big points for me from this podcast was that the osteo in Clint's knees have NOT degraded over time, whilst following this kind of lifestyle. This is key, because so many people think that because they have osteo therefore it will continue to get worse despite whatever. I know this is only an anecdote of Clint's own story, but it at least gives me hope that my own joints will not deteriorate, at least not significantly from hereon out.
On this subject of of osteo continuing damage, here in the UK, the NHS is not geared up to monitoring osteo continuing damage. For example I have had MRI scans, but these only tend to happen when the NHS thinks you are nearing the point where joints might need surgery. That is the NHS has a reactive approach, one that only does MRI scans when knees etc are nearing the point of no return. An alternative, pro-active approach could be to monitoring joints annually to see if joints are degrading over time or are stable, or are improving. Thus the NHS has little or no data on what lifestyle interventions might do to help reduce or improve osteo conditions - excepting the overarching consensus around being overweight.
It is because of this re-active approach and lack of pro-active approach in the medical profession and the consequetial overall lack of scientific data & research that we must lean strongly on relevant anecdotes. My own story echoes Clint's story absolutely 100% all the way down the line. I find that so re-assuring that I will reasonably discount all the nay-sayers who would argue that my osteo will get worse regardless.
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Rheumatoid Arthritis 
Arthritis and exercise
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Anyone else coping on the "Drug Freeway"?
