ANTHONY WILLIAMS TALK ABOUT RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS (PART 1)

In medical circles, the term rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is used as a diagnosis for a disease that chronically and painfully inflames the joints. A more appropriate term would be swollen joint disease , or disease causing joint pain , or unexplained pain disorder . Because let's be honest: if medical research hasn't found the explanation for certain sets of symptoms, and in the case of rheumatoid arthritis they still haven't, then it's better to call it what doctors know it to be. Using all sorts of twisted names doesn't help anyone, least of all the patients.

RA most commonly affects the small joints of the hands and feet. It can also affect the knees, elbows and other large joints. Rheumatoid arthritis can also affect other parts of the body, such as the nerves, skin, mouth, eyes, lungs, and/or heart. Joint pain and swelling are the most noticeable results of this disease – over time, joint and bone damage and/or deformity can occur.

The medical community does not know that the actual number of people affected by RA is higher than the statistics show worldwide. Their age varies widely - from 15 to 60 years. The disease affects five times more women than men.

The medical community believes that rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease – ie. a condition in which a confused immune system mistakes parts of your body as invaders and responds by constantly attacking them. It means your body is turning against you without you having a say.

Medical institutions train doctors to use similar explanations for mysterious illnesses in all cases of unexplained illnesses. Thus, they give patients a false sense of security and make them feel as if their health care providers understand what is happening to them and why it is happening to them, to feel as if they have some control over what happens. it happens This explanation of an autoimmune disease does not help the sufferers at all. When the patient constructs the mental image of cells turning against each other, it sends the wrong message – he is left with the attitude that his body has betrayed him and that he cannot be trusted to heal himself.

It is extremely important to know that our body does not attack itself. Here's the truth: inflammation in the joints occurs to protect you from the attack of a particularly common virus. Your body works hard to prevent pathogens from burrowing deeper into your joints and the tissue around them. When the inflammation becomes long-lasting and chronic, then it becomes a problem known as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) – but your body still works to protect itself from viral damage.

Doctors still believe there is no cure for rheumatoid arthritis. They are wrong in this regard as well.

In the two parts of this article, we'll explain what rheumatoid arthritis really is...and how you can take control and regain your health.

How to recognize rheumatoid arthritis

If you have rheumatoid arthritis, you probably suffer from a particular set of symptoms, and there's a good reason for that. These symptoms are the result of your body using its defenses to protect itself from the common viral pathogen:

• Joint pain - especially in the wrists and knuckles, knees and/or the pads of the toes, but in general, any joint can be affected.
• Inflammation of the joints.
• Stiffness in the joints, especially in the morning, which may last for hours.
• Tingling and/or numbness, especially in the hands and/or feet.
• Fluid accumulation, especially in the ankles or behind the knees.
• Fatigue, fever, and other intermittent flu-like symptoms.
• Heart palpitations.
• Burning or itching of the skin.
• Floating burning pain.
• Neuralgic pains.

Doctors use certain methods to try to identify RA, but none of them are completely definitive. Below is a list of specific tests they use. Note that they are not infallible, as they are not designed to look for the true root cause of rheumatoid arthritis. These tests do not detect the viral pathogen that causes RA. Rather, they can serve as a guide to how much inflammation is present in the body, and even then, these guides are not always accurate in terms of the degree of inflammation in the body.

• Rheumatoid factor blood test: This checks for the presence of antibodies that doctors associate with RA. However, this test can give a positive result in perfectly healthy people or in people who have some unrelated disease, such as lupus. At the same time, it can give a negative result in people who actually have symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. Therefore, it is not very useful.
• Anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide (anti-CCP) blood test: this newer antibody test is better at identifying cases of rheumatoid arthritis inflammation than the rheumatoid factor test, but is still far from definitive. The question is, what does he actually discover? Because remember, they don't know the cause of RA.
• Erythrocyte sedimentation rate blood test: this checks for high levels of inflammation. There are many causes of inflammation, so this test does not accurately determine rheumatoid arthritis. However, it can be used to understand how severe the inflammation is; so if you have RA, this can help you gauge its aggressiveness. On the other hand, someone can have higher levels of inflammation without having symptoms.
• C-reactive protein blood test: tests for high levels of a protein associated with active inflammation. However, this protein is also formed by other factors, including obesity. Again, inflammation alone does not determine the cause like rheumatoid arthritis.
• Ultrasound and MRI: these can be used to track the inflammatory activity that has caused bone damage over time.
• MTHFR gene mutation test: it is used because it identifies a problem with a gene mutation that can be the cause of a number of symptoms of any kind of disease that is thought to be caused by inflammation. This test is far from conclusive. It gives false positives for gene mutations when in reality it just acts as a test for inflammation - just like the others on this list. Virtually anyone who has inflammation will test positive for an MTHFR gene mutation. It's a vaunted inflammation test with gene terminology attached to it. (The positive side of this test is that it shows that there is still a search for answers. While MTHFR gene mutations are not the right answers—they are not the reason people are sick—we applaud the medical community for its continued quest to find the causes, which make people sick).

Another way to determine if you have rheumatoid arthritis is to learn the truth about what this disease really is.

Expect a continuation in the second part of the article "Anthony William talks about rheumatoid arthritis (part 2)" .