Arthritis Day Quotes

Having a chronic illness, Molly thought, was like being invaded. Her grandmother back in Michigan used to tell about the day one of their cows got loose and wandered into the parlor, and the awful time they had getting her out. That was exactly what Molly's arthritis was like: as if some big old cow had got into her house and wouldn't go away. It just sat there, taking up space in her life and making everything more difficult, mooing loudly from time to time and making cow pies, and all she could do really was edge around it and put up with it. When other people first became aware of the cow, they expressed concern and anxiety. They suggested strategies for getting the animal out of Molly's parlor: remedies and doctors and procedures, some mainstream and some New Age. They related anecdotes of friends who had removed their own cows in one way or another. But after a while they had exhausted their suggestions. Then they usually began to pretend that the cow wasn't there, and they preferred for Molly to go along with the pretense.

If your body is screaming in pain, whether the pain is muscular contractions, anxiety, depression, asthma or arthritis, a first step in releasing the pain may be making the connection between your body pain and the cause. “Beliefs are physical. A thought held long enough and repeated enough becomes a belief. The belief then becomes biology.

Do you know about the spoons? Because you should. The Spoon Theory was created by a friend of mine, Christine Miserandino, to explain the limits you have when you live with chronic illness. Most healthy people have a seemingly infinite number of spoons at their disposal, each one representing the energy needed to do a task. You get up in the morning. That’s a spoon. You take a shower. That’s a spoon. You work, and play, and clean, and love, and hate, and that’s lots of damn spoons … but if you are young and healthy you still have spoons left over as you fall asleep and wait for the new supply of spoons to be delivered in the morning. But if you are sick or in pain, your exhaustion changes you and the number of spoons you have. Autoimmune disease or chronic pain like I have with my arthritis cuts down on your spoons. Depression or anxiety takes away even more. Maybe you only have six spoons to use that day. Sometimes you have even fewer. And you look at the things you need to do and realize that you don’t have enough spoons to do them all. If you clean the house you won’t have any spoons left to exercise. You can visit a friend but you won’t have enough spoons to drive yourself back home. You can accomplish everything a normal person does for hours but then you hit a wall and fall into bed thinking, “I wish I could stop breathing for an hour because it’s exhausting, all this inhaling and exhaling.” And then your husband sees you lying on the bed and raises his eyebrow seductively and you say, “No. I can’t have sex with you today because there aren’t enough spoons,” and he looks at you strangely because that sounds kinky, and not in a good way. And you know you should explain the Spoon Theory so he won’t get mad but you don’t have the energy to explain properly because you used your last spoon of the morning picking up his dry cleaning so instead you just defensively yell: “I SPENT ALL MY SPOONS ON YOUR LAUNDRY,” and he says, “What the … You can’t pay for dry cleaning with spoons. What is wrong with you?” Now you’re mad because this is his fault too but you’re too tired to fight out loud and so you have the argument in your mind, but it doesn’t go well because you’re too tired to defend yourself even in your head, and the critical internal voices take over and you’re too tired not to believe them. Then you get more depressed and the next day you wake up with even fewer spoons and so you try to make spoons out of caffeine and willpower but that never really works. The only thing that does work is realizing that your lack of spoons is not your fault, and to remind yourself of that fact over and over as you compare your fucked-up life to everyone else’s just-as-fucked-up-but-not-as-noticeably-to-outsiders lives. Really, the only people you should be comparing yourself to would be people who make you feel better by comparison. For instance, people who are in comas, because those people have no spoons at all and you don’t see anyone judging them. Personally, I always compare myself to Galileo because everyone knows he’s fantastic, but he has no spoons at all because he’s dead. So technically I’m better than Galileo because all I’ve done is take a shower and already I’ve accomplished more than him today. If we were having a competition I’d have beaten him in daily accomplishments every damn day of my life. But I’m not gloating because Galileo can’t control his current spoon supply any more than I can, and if Galileo couldn’t figure out how to keep his dwindling spoon supply I think it’s pretty unfair of me to judge myself for mine. I’ve learned to use my spoons wisely. To say no. To push myself, but not too hard. To try to enjoy the amazingness of life while teetering at the edge of terror and fatigue.

Irony of the day: arthritis medication with a cap that old people can't get off, because of their arthritis.

Uncompromising trust in the love of God inspires us to thank God for the spiritual darkness that envelops us, for the loss of income, for the nagging arthritis that is so painful, and to pray from the heart, “Abba, into your hands I entrust my body, mind, and spirit and this entire day—morning, afternoon, evening, and night. Whatever you want of me, I want of me, falling into you and trusting in you in the midst of my life. Into your heart I entrust my heart, feeble, distracted, insecure, uncertain. Abba, unto you I abandon myself in Jesus our Lord. Amen.

No kneeling for him these days, though, arthritis and Catholicism being an uneasy mix.

Children working in the carpet industry often suffer from many health problems. These include breathing difficulties from inhaling the carpet fibres, arthritis in their fingers from tying the tiny knots, and growth deformities from working hunched over their looms for so long every day.

The pain from his arthritis was sewn through the fabric of his day, like a bright needle threaded with dull wire.

The last e-mail I got about the get-together suggested several shoe changes in one day. I only have one pair of nice shoes and they’re flats. MY SISTER: Well, you have arthritis, so you have a good excuse. ME: Yes, but I feel like I need to put that on my shirt: “Please don’t judge my flats. I have a disability.

How to be there for someone with depression or anxiety 1. Know that you are needed, and appreciated, even if it seems you are not. 2. Listen. 3. Never say ‘pull yourself together’ or ‘cheer up’ unless you’re also going to provide detailed, foolproof instructions. (Tough love doesn’t work. Turns out that just good old ‘love’ is enough.) 4. Appreciate that it is an illness. Things will be said that aren’t meant. 5. Educate yourself. Understand, above all, that what might seem easy to you –going to a shop, for instance –might be an impossible challenge for a depressive. 6. Don’t take anything personally, any more than you would take someone suffering with the flu or chronic fatigue syndrome or arthritis personally. None of this is your fault. 7. Be patient. Understand it isn’t going to be easy. Depression ebbs and flows and moves up and down. It doesn’t stay still. Do not take one happy/ bad moment as proof of recovery/ relapse. Play the long game. 8. Meet them where they are. Ask what you can do. The main thing you can do is just be there. 9. Relieve any work/ life pressure if that is doable. 10. Where possible, don’t make the depressive feel weirder than they already feel. Three days on the sofa? Haven’t opened the curtains? Crying over difficult decisions like which pair of socks to wear? So what. No biggie. There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.

There was an old Taoist who lived in a village in ancient China, named Master Hu. Hu loved God and God loved Hu, and whatever God did was fine with Hu, and whatever Hu did was fine with God. They were friends. They were such good friends that they kidded around. Hu would do stuff to God like call him "The Great Clod." That's how he kidded. That was fine with God. God would turn around and do stuff to Hu like give him warts on his face, wens on his head, arthritis in his hands, a hunch in his back, canker sores in his mouth and gout in his feet. That's how He kidded. That God. What a kidder! But it was fine with Hu. Master Hu grew lumpy as a toad; he grew crooked as cherry wood; he became a human pretzel. "You Clod!" he'd shout at God, laughing. That was fine with God. He'd send Hu a right leg ten inches shorter than the left to show He was listening. And Hu would laugh some more and walk around in little circles, showing off his short leg, saying to the villagers, "Haha! See how the Great Clod listens! How lumpy and crookedy and ugly He is making me! He makes me laugh and laugh! That's what a Friend is for!" And the people of the village would look at him and wag their heads: sure enough, old Hu looked like an owl's nest; he looked like a swamp; he looked like something the dog rolled in. And he winked at his people and looked up at God and shouted, "Hey Clod! What next?" And splot! Out popped a fresh wart. The people wagged their heads till their tongues wagged too. They said, "Poor Master Hu has gone crazy." And maybe he had. Maybe God sent down craziness along with the warts and wens and hunch and gout. What did Hu care? It was fine with him. He loved God and God loved Hu, and Hu was the crookedest, ugliest, happiest old man in all the empire till the day he whispered, Hey Clod! What now? and God took his line in hand and drew him right into Himself. That was fine with Hu. That's what a Friend is for.

Almondine To her, the scent and the memory of him were one. Where it lay strongest, the distant past came to her as if that morning: Taking a dead sparrow from her jaws, before she knew to hide such things. Guiding her to the floor, bending her knee until the arthritis made it stick, his palm hotsided on her ribs to measure her breaths and know where the pain began. And to comfort her. That had been the week before he went away. He was gone, she knew this, but something of him clung to the baseboards. At times the floor quivered under his footstep. She stood then and nosed into the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom-especially the closet-her intention to press her ruff against his hand, run it along his thigh, feel the heat of his body through the fabric. Places, times, weather-all these drew him up inside her. Rain, especially, falling past the double doors of the kennel, where he’d waited through so many storms, each drop throwing a dozen replicas into the air as it struck the waterlogged earth. And where the rising and falling water met, something like an expectation formed, a place where he might appear and pass in long strides, silent and gestureless. For she was not without her own selfish desires: to hold things motionless, to measure herself against them and find herself present, to know that she was alive precisely because he needn’t acknowledge her in casual passing; that utter constancy might prevail if she attended the world so carefully. And if not constancy, then only those changes she desired, not those that sapped her, undefined her. And so she searched. She’d watched his casket lowered into the ground, a box, man-made, no more like him than the trees that swayed under the winter wind. To assign him an identity outside the world was not in her thinking. The fence line where he walked and the bed where he slept-that was where he lived, and they remembered him. Yet he was gone. She knew it most keenly in the diminishment of her own self. In her life, she’d been nourished and sustained by certain things, him being one of them, Trudy another, and Edgar, the third and most important, but it was really the three of them together, intersecting in her, for each of them powered her heart a different way. Each of them bore different responsibilities to her and with her and required different things from her, and her day was the fulfillment of those responsibilities. She could not imagine that portion of her would never return. With her it was not hope, or wistful thoughts-it was her sense of being alive that thinned by the proportion of her spirit devoted to him. "ory of Edgar Sawtelle" As spring came on, his scent about the place began to fade. She stopped looking for him. Whole days she slept beside his chair, as the sunlight drifted from eastern-slant to western-slant, moving only to ease the weight of her bones against the floor. And Trudy and Edgar, encapsulated in mourning, somehow forgot to care for one another, let alone her. Or if they knew, their grief and heartache overwhelmed them. Anyway, there was so little they might have done, save to bring out a shirt of his to lie on, perhaps walk with her along the fence line, where fragments of time had snagged and hung. But if they noticed her grief, they hardly knew to do those things. And she without the language to ask.

A severe attack of rheumatoid arthritis sent him to the hospital for six weeks at the end of 1918. Cautioned that he might be required to use a wheelchair for the remainder of his days, he said, “All right! I can work that way, too.

After hearing much from his patients about alleged faith-healing, a Minnesota physician named William Nolen spent a year and a half trying to track down the most striking cases. Was there clear medical evidence that the disease was really present before the ‘cure’? If so, had the disease actually disappeared after the cure, or did we just have the healer’s or the patient’s say-so? He uncovered many cases of fraud, including the first exposure in America of ‘psychic surgery’. But he found not one instance of cure of any serious organic (non-psychogenic) disease. There were no cases where gallstones or rheumatoid arthritis, say, were cured, much less cancer or cardiovascular disease. When a child’s spleen is ruptured, Nolen noted, perform a simple surgical operation and the child is completely better. But take that child to a faith-healer and she’s dead in a day.

When I first stopped trying to fix other people, I turned my attention to 'curing' myself. I was in a hurry to get this healing process over. I wanted immediate recovery from the effects of growing up in a family riddled with alcoholism and from being married to an alcoholic. I looked forward to the day I would graduate from Al-Anon and get on with my life. As year two and year three passed, I was still in the program. I began to despair as the character defects I had worked so long to overcome came back to haunt me, particularly during times of stress and during periods when I didn't attend meetings. I have severe arthritis in my joints. To cope with my condition, I have to assess my body each day and patiently respond to its needs. Some days I need a warm bath to get going in the morning. On other days I apply a medicated rub to the painful areas. Yet other days some light stretching and exercise help to loosen me up. I'ave accepted that my arthritis will never go away. It's a condition I manage daily with consistent, on-going care. One day I made a connection between my medical condition and my struggle with recovery. I began to look at myself as having 'arthritis of the personality,' requiring patient, continuous care to keep me from 'stiffening' into old habits and attitudes. This care includes attending meetings, reading Al-Anon literature, calling my sponsor, and engaging in service. Now, as long as I practice patience, recovery is a manageable and adventurous process instead of an arduously sought end point.

When I flew back to Chicago that fateful day in 1954, I had a freshly signed contract with the McDonald brothers in my briefcase. I was a battle-scarred veteran of the business wars, but I was still eager to go into action. I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns. But I was convinced that the best was ahead of me.

used to drink every night. Every night I drank a bottle of tequila and went to bed and slept like a baby. I was never sick a day; I looked good, I felt good, I slept well. No more. Now I have one cold after the other, headaches, arthritis; and I can’t sleep a wink. All because the doctor said I had to stop drinking tequila. But don’t jump to conclusions. I’m not a drunk. You can take all the wine and whiskey in the world and dump it down the Grand Canyon. It’s only that I like tequila.

Elisabetta Gonzaga de Montefeltro, Duchess of Urbino, was one of the most celebrat women of her age. . . She was much praised for her saintliness in enduring a sexless marriage to Guidobaldo who was both impotent and for much of his life crippled by what was described as 'gout' but was probably rheumatoid arthritis, which deformed his body from a young age. According to the archivist Luzio, despite his impotence Guidobaldo was extremely erotically inclined, so that Elisabetta was in a state of suspense every day in case he might fall upon her and have a relapse.

The majority of people living with chronic pain have the symptoms attributed to conditions that are not fully understood, including Spinal Stenosis, Fibromyalgia, Diabetic Neuropathy, Arthritis, and Restless Leg Syndrome. These diagnoses provide a label allowing the patient to be classified and guiding physicians to treat, but often do not reflect the true cause of symptoms. Using approaches presented in Walking Well Again, both patients and clinicians are guided to recognizing and treating the hidden causes of pain, which often results in relief in just one or two days.

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.

You’re as beautiful as you were the night we made our son,” she whispered, bending to kiss him tenderly. His fingers traced her dark eyebrows, her cheeks, her mouth. “I wish we could have another baby,” he said heavily. “So do I. But I’m too old,” she said sadly. She lay her cheek against his broad, damp chest and stroked the silver-tipped hair that covered it. “We’ll have to hope for grandchildren, if he ever forgives us.” He held her tightly, as if by holding her he could keep her safe. What he felt for her was ferociously protective. She misunderstood the tightening of his arms. She smiled and sighed. “We can’t, again. Cecily will think we’ve deserted her.” His hand smoothed her long hair. “She probably knows exactly what we’re doing,” he said on a chuckle. “She loves you.” “She likes you. Maybe we could adopt her.” “Better if our son marries her.” She grinned. “We can hope.” She sat up and stretched, liking the way he watched her still-firm breasts. “The last time I felt like this was thirty-six years ago,” she confided. “The same is true for me,” he replied. She searched his eyes, already facing her departure. She would have to go back to the reservation, home. He could still read her better than she knew. He drew her hand to his mouth. “It’s too late, but I want to marry you. This week. As soon as possible.” She was surprised. She didn’t know what to say. “I love you,” he said. “I never stopped. Forgive me and say yes.” She considered the enormity of what she would be agreeing to do. Be his hostess. Meet his friends. Go to fund-raising events. Wear fancy clothes. Act sophisticated. “Your life is so different from mine,” she began. “Don’t you start,” he murmured. “I’ve seen what it did to Cecily when Tate used that same argument with her about all the differences. It won’t work with me. We love each other too much to worry about trivial things. Say yes. We’ll work out all the details later.” “There will be parties, benefits…” He pulled her down into his arms and kissed her tenderly. “I don’t know much about etiquette,” she tried again. He rolled her over, pinning her gently. One long leg inserted itself between both of hers as he kissed her. “Oh, what the hell,” she murmured, and wrapped her legs around his, groaning as the joints protested. “Arthritis?” he asked. “Osteoarthritis.” “Me, too.” He shifted, groaning a little himself as he eased down. “We’ll work on new positions one day. But it’s…too late…now. Leta…!” he gasped. She didn’t have enough breath to answer him. He didn’t seem to notice that she hadn’t. Bad joints notwithstanding, they managed to do quite a few things that weren’t recommended for people their ages. And some that weren’t in the book at all.

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens. How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence? What did it offer in return? It did not offer a better diet. Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on a wide variety of foods. Grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the Agricultural Revolution. A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums.

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa. Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin ‘domus’, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.

Even if the body’s inflammatory response is a necessary part of its physiology to heal wounds, fight infection, and rebuild the muscles. However, too much inflammation leads to a number of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, atherosclerosis, arthritis, autonomous disorders, cancer, chronic pain, eczema, premature aging, and yeast infection. Sugar is an inflammatory food and having too much sugar in the body exposes it to a continuously inflamed state. Sugar detox helps prevent the foretasted conditions which put sugar addicts at a higher risk of contracting these conditions.

One of my favorites is Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, by James Pennebaker. A psychologist and researcher, Pennebaker believes that regular journaling strengthens our immune cells, as well as helps combat the symptoms of asthma and arthritis. He has even found that writing about stressful events helps us come to terms with them, reducing their impact on our health. People who journal every day have lower rates of depression, blood potassium, and even body weight. In short, journaling is healthy.

SOMATIC CONVERSION A third form of conversion is the conversion of needs and feelings into some form of bodily or somatic expression. Needs and feelings can be changed into bodily sickness. When one is sick, one is usually cared for. When one is sick, one can feel as bad as one really feels. This conversion dynamic is especially prevalent in family systems where sickness is given attention and rewarded. I was asthmatic as a child. Frequently when I wanted to miss a day of school, I would induce an asthma attack. I learned early on that sickness got a lot of sympathy in my family system. Getting attention with sickness is a very common phenomenon. When people want to miss work, they call in sick. Sickness works! Conversion of feelings into sickness is the basis of psychosomatic illness. In Max’s family there were several generations of hypochondriasis. His maternal great-grandmother was bedridden off and on for years. His maternal grandmother was literally bedridden for forty-five years, and his mom, Felicia, continually struggled with ulcers, colitis and arthritis. Max himself obsessed on illness a lot. My own belief is that families don’t convert feelings and needs to actual physical illness unless there are predisposing genetically based factors, such as a genetic history of asthma, arthritis or particular organ weakness. When parental modeling and high rewards for somatic illness are added to a genetic predisposition, the conversion of feelings and needs into bodily or somatic expression is a real possibility.

3) Third, is the ability to discontinue medications. Most of you will be able to reduce or eliminate your medications for high blood pressure, type II diabetes, arthritis, indigestion, reflux, and constipation, among other things. Imagine the freedom that will come with being healthy without having to depend on pills, without having to worry about paying for them, without being limited by their schedule, and without having to endure their side effects. (Please note you should NOT alter your medication regimens without physician supervision.) 4) Next, is improvement in vigor, vitality, and overall well-being within DAYS of starting the program. You will shed those feelings of fatigue, heaviness, and mental cloudiness and they will be replaced by energy, agility, and clarity. In addition, rather than crashing after a meal, feeling sluggish at best, you will be invigorated. 5) Finally, you can save thousands of dollars per year in food and health care costs. Sound too good to be true? Let’s take a closer look, beginning with research that has shown that adopting healthier eating habits can save you as much as $2000 to $4500 a year.30 Add to that the thousands of dollars per year you can save just by stopping five of the most commonly used medications (for cholesterol, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, reflux, and arthritis). Moreover, many of you have bought into the need for taking supplements to enhance your diets. Unfortunately, not all of these supplements are necessary

children most likely to develop allergies and asthma were only children who lived in cities, did not go to daycare, had no pets, washed their hands more than five times a day and bathed more than once a day. The list of diseases possibly contracted in this way came to include rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis and even heart disease.

People with psoriatic arthritis that medication traditionally couldn’t help found foods that were causing what they considered to be inflammatory flares, and their psoriatic arthritis was all but cured.

But that one cell started from a healthy cell. So, the question is, how can we keep all of our cells healthy? How can we keep our immune system beautifully active? One answer, of course, is to upgrade the food we put into our bodies—by eating real food, every day.

You know, I reckon you’ve had a narrow escape. I was reading an article about early-onset arthritis in rugby players, and apparently the whole lot of them are cripples by the time they get to sixty. And they’re the ones who are sixty now; they played a hell of a lot less games forty years ago.’ ‘But they patch them up a lot better these days,’ I pointed out. ‘There’s still not much you can do about having no cartilage left in any of your joints.’ ‘They can replace knees and hips.’ ‘Not shoulders. Or fingers. How many of them has he dislocated?’ ‘I don’t know. A few.’ ‘There you go. Those’ll all be buggered in another ten years. You would have ended up wiping his bum for him.’ ‘I wouldn’t have minded,’ I muttered. He passed me out a handful of bolts and shuffled along to the next corner. ‘You’re pathetic. And there’s another reason you should have been heading for the hills.’ ‘What?’ I asked. ‘Do you know what the All Blacks’ motto is?’ ‘“Feed your backs”?’ ‘Nope. It is – and I kid you not – “Subdue and penetrate”.’ ‘I don’t believe you.’ ‘Google it then.’ ‘Maybe it didn’t sound so dodgy a hundred years ago when they came up with it,’ I said weakly. ‘Of course it did. It’s not like human biology’s changed since then. Very shady people, rugby players.

        Cracking your knuckles causes arthritis. That crack sound is an air bubble escaping from your joints. Donald Unger cracked the knuckles on his left hand every single day for fifty years! He never did it to his right hand. And guess what? His hands were exactly the same. No arthritis. When this was confirmed, he looked up to the heavens and shouted, “YOU WERE WRONG MOTHER!!!” What a guy.

How to be there for someone with depression or anxiety 1. Know that you are needed, and appreciated, even if it seems you are not. 2. Listen. 3. Never say “pull yourself together” or “cheer up” unless you’re also going to provide detailed, foolproof instructions. (Tough love doesn’t work. Turns out that just good old “love” is enough.) 4. Appreciate that it is an illness. Things will be said that aren’t meant. 5. Educate yourself. Understand, above all, that what might seem easy to you—going to a shop, for instance—might be an impossible challenge for a depressive. 6. Don’t take anything personally, any more than you would take someone suffering with the flu or chronic fatigue syndrome or arthritis personally. None of this is your fault. 7. Be patient. Understand it isn’t going to be easy. Depression ebbs and flows and moves up and down. It doesn’t stay still. Do not take one happy/bad moment as proof of recovery/relapse. Play the long game. 8. Meet them where they are. Ask what you can do. The main thing you can do is just be there. 9. Relieve any work/life pressure if that is doable. 10. Where possible, don’t make the depressive feel weirder than they already feel. Three days on the sofa? Haven’t opened the curtains? Crying over difficult decisions like which pair of socks to wear? So what. No biggie. There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.

Don’t fuck with an old lady, you shitty kid,” I yelled. “I have a lifetime of asshole tricks up my sleeve. They’re all right behind my Kleenex and my emergency Advil.” Mind you, I was doing all this in no bra, sweatpants, and leather slippers with shearling lining. “Sara,” I asked, “when we all get together for dinner in a restaurant, do you think other people see a group of old people having dinner instead of—us?” “Yeah,” she said after she thought for a moment. “Yeah, I think they see old people.” And that’s a trip, because when I look at Sara, I still see Sara. I see Sara as she was at twenty-seven. She hasn’t changed to me. Most of my friends haven’t changed, in my opinion. Jim lost his hair, but so what? Lots of guys shave their heads. Sandra has a couple of gray hairs in her long, jet-black hair. And yet, some of our friend group has died. From heart attacks. Pancreatitis. Liver failure. Drug overdoses. Suicides. Cancer. Aneurysms. We were stunned by each of those deaths. Honestly, drug overdoses and suicides are almost easier to take than pancreatitis and heart attacks, because those diseases rarely happen to kids our age. And then one day, your body stops working. It can be sudden, like throwing out your back while shaving your legs, and it just never goes back to normal. You live the rest of your days with a “bad back.” Then there’s the opposite; there’s the creep. In your thirties, a nerve pings in your hand, like someone has plucked a rubber band inside it. It’s startling and odd. In another five years, your hands start to tingle a little bit when you’re typing, and you buy a pair of hand braces to wear at night. In the next five years, you can’t open a jar, and in the five years after that, they suddenly fall asleep and you have to elicit a hearty round of applause to no one to wake them back up and make them functional again. And no one prepared me for that. I noticed that my nana’s fingers were oddly formed, racked with arthritis, but she never explained that they hadn’t always been like that. She never told me that once, a long time ago, she had hands just like mine, until she felt that first ping. And that’s the weird thing. As a young person, you assume all old people were just always that way—unfortunate. They came like that. And, as an old person, you think that young people surely understand that yesterday, you were just like them.

I was about to head out of one polling site when a Black man my father’s age approached me. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.” He was ushering an old woman dressed in her Sunday best, complete with a lavender hat, by the elbow. She pressed her cane into the ground as she repositioned her leg between strides. She trained her eyes on mine as she walked. I walked to meet her where she was. “Hello, ma’am. How are you?” I said, smiling, as she extended her warm, soft hand, contorted by arthritis. I clasped it between both of mine. She released her cane to the man who had introduced us, who must have been her son, placing her other hand on top of mine and squeezing. She shuffled closer, and I could instantly smell my own grandmother’s hair cream. I wondered how old she was. “You tell President Obama”—her words fired like a slow cannon as she patted the top of my hand with each syllable, lingering on the final word with a swallow—“that I voted for him and that he is making us proud. You tell him that I lived to see the day.” I indulged her willingly. “I sure will, ma’am.” “You tell him and those babies that we are prayerful. A Black man in the Oval Office. My God. We are prayerful.” “Yes, ma’am,” I said, still holding her hands. “My grandson brought me down here to vote today.” I was dying to ask her age now. “And he told me that we had a Black woman, a sister, making sure no one messed with our votes.” I nodded. “God bless you for coming. God bless President Obama for making it so. I always vote now. I always come out. Rain or shine. I’m here, isn’t that right?” she said, turning to her grandson. She must have been in her nineties if he was her grandson. “Yes. She wouldn’t miss it. Means too much. She was on the front lines. Been on the front lines,” he explained.

Working on a shoestring, which in my case is more often a matter of circumstance than of choice, never appeared to me as a cornerstone for aesthetics, and Dogme-type stuff just bores me. So it’s rather in order to bring some comfort to young filmmakers in need that I mention these few technical details: The material for La Jetee was created with a Pentax 24x36, and the only “cinema” part (the blinking of the eyes) with an Arriflex 35mm film camera, borrowed for one hour. Sans Soleil was entirely shot with a 16mm Beaulieu silent film camera (not one sync take within the whole film), with 100-foot reels – 2'44" autonomy! –and a small cassette recorder (not even a Walkman; they didn’t exist yet). The only “sophisticated” device – given the time – was the spectre image synthesizer, also borrowed for a few days. This is to say that the basic tools for these two films were literally available to anyone. No silly boasting here, just the conviction that today, with the advent of computer and small DV cameras (unintentional homage to Dziga Vertov), would-be directors need no longer submit their fate to the unpredictability of producers or the arthritis of televisions, and that by following their whims or passions, they perhaps see one day their tinkering elevated to DVD status by honorable men.

Theoretically he sees no distinction between his mother and any other aged female. He knows that, in a properly organized society, she'd be put into the lethal chamber, because of her arthritis. In spite of which he sends her I don't know how much a week to enable her to drag on a useless existence. I twitted him about it the other day. He blushed and was terribly upset, as though he’d been caught cheating at cards. So, to restore his prestige, he had to change the subject and begin talking about political murder and its advantages with the most wonderfully calm, detached, scientific ferocity. I only laughed at him. ‘One of these days,” I threatened, “I’ll take you at your word and invite you to a man-shooting party.” And what’s more, I will.

A thread of light leaked through the window, which was ajar, and he was able to make out the wide bed in which his father had died and his mother had slept every night since she was married. It was carved in black wood, with a canopy of angels in relief and a few scraps of red brocade that were frayed with age. His mother was propped up in a half-seated position. She was a block of solid flesh, a monstrous pyramid of fat and rags that came to a point in a tiny bald head with a pair of eyes that were sweet, blue, innocent, and surprisingly alive. Arthritis had transformed her into a monolithic being. She could no longer bend any of her joints or turn her head. Her fingers were clawed like the feet of a fossil, and in order to sit up in bed she had to be supported by a pillow at her back held in place by a wooden beam that, in turn, was propped against the wall. The passage of time could be read by the marks the beam had cut into the plaster: a path of suffering, a trail of pain. “Mama,” Esteban murmured, and his voice broke in his chest, exploding into a contained sobbing that erased in a single stroke his sad memories, the rancid smells, frozen mornings, and greasy soup of his impoverished childhood, his invalid mother and absent father, and the rage that had been gnawing at him ever since the day he first learned how to think, so that he forgot everything except those rare, luminous moments in which this unknown woman who now lay before him in her bed had rocked him in her arms, felt his forehead for fever, sung him lullabies, bent over to read the pages of a favorite book with him, had wept with grief to see him leave for work so early in the morning when he was still a boy, wept with joy when he returned at night, had wept. Mother, for me.

Handwriting in a journal can offer a wealth of self-care benefits. James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas, researched the effects of daily journaling by hand. He discovered that journaling, even just for a few minutes a day, built up T-lymphocytes, cells in the immune system, and reduced the symptoms of arthritis and asthma. Further research suggests that writing in a diary about life events also relieves stress and promotes emotional well-being.

a 2016 study linked another protein in wheat, amylase-trypsin inhibitors (ATIs), to inflammation in the lymph nodes, kidneys, spleen, and brain, and suggested that it could be linked to arthritis, asthma, and fatty liver disease, among other things.

Chapatis will soon become EXTINCT A renowned cardiologist explains how eliminating wheat can IMPROVE your health. Cardiologist William Davis, MD, started his career repairing damaged hearts through angioplasty and bypass surgeries. “That’s what I was trained to do, and at first, that’s what I wanted to do,” he explains. But when his own mother died of a heart attack in 1995, despite receiving the best cardiac care, he was forced to face nagging concerns about his profession. "I’d fix a patient’s heart, only to see him come back with the same problems. It was just a band-aid, with no effort to identify the cause of the disease.” So he moved his practice toward highly uncharted medical territory prevention and spent the next 15 years examining the causes of heart disease in his patients. The resulting discoveries are revealed in "Wheat Belly", his New York Times best-selling book, which attributes many of our physical problems, including heart disease, diabetes and obesity, to our consumption of wheat. Eliminating wheat can “transform our lives.” What is a “Wheat Belly”? Wheat raises your blood sugar dramatically. In fact, two slices of wheat bread raise your blood sugar more than a Snickers bar. "When my patients give up wheat, weight loss was substantial, especially from the abdomen. People can lose several inches in the first month." You make connections between wheat and a host of other health problems. Eighty percent of my patients had diabetes or pre-diabetes. I knew that wheat spiked blood sugar more than almost anything else, so I said, “Let’s remove wheat from your diet and see what happens to your blood sugar.” They’d come back 3 to 6 months later, and their blood sugar would be dramatically reduced. But they also had all these other reactions: “I removed wheat and I lost 38 pounds.” Or, “my asthma got so much better, I threw away two of my inhalers.” Or “the migraine headaches I’ve had every day for 20 years stopped within three days.” “My acid reflux is now gone.” “My IBS is better, my ulcerative colitis, my rheumatoid arthritis, my mood, my sleep . . .” and so on, and so on". When you look at the makeup of wheat, Amylopectin A, a chemical unique to wheat, is an incredible trigger of small LDL particles in the blood – the number one cause of heart disease. When wheat is removed from the diet, these small LDL levels plummet by 80 and 90 percent. Wheat contains high levels of Gliadin, a protein that actually stimulates appetite. Eating wheat increases the average person’s calorie intake by 400 calories a day. Gliadin also has opiate-like properties which makes it "addictive". Food scientists have known this for almost 20 years. Is eating a wheat-free diet the same as a gluten-free diet? Gluten is just one component of wheat. If we took the gluten out of it, wheat will still be bad since it will still have the Gliadin and the Amylopectin A, as well as several other undesirable components. Gluten-free products are made with 4 basic ingredients: corn starch, rice starch, tapioca starch or potato starch. And those 4 dried, powdered starches are some of the foods that raise blood sugar even higher. I encourage people to return to REAL food: Fruits Vegetables and nuts and seeds, Unpasteurized cheese , Eggs and meats Wheat really changed in the 70s and 80s due to a series of techniques used to increase yield, including hybridization. It was bred to be shorter and sturdier and also to have more Gliadin, (a potent appetite stimulant) The wheat we eat today is not the wheat that was eaten 100 years ago. If you stop eating breads/pasta/chapatis every day, and start eating chicken, eggs, salads and vegetables you still lose weight as these products don’t raise blood sugar as high as wheat, and it also doesn’t have the Amylopectin A or the Gliadin that stimulates appetite. You won’t have the same increase in calorie intake that wheat causes.

Here are seven categories of foods that should be avoided if pain and inflammation are a major symptom of your arthritis. 1. Animal Milk Products (Milk, Cream, Ice Cream, Cheese, Cottage Cheese, Yogurt) 2. Hydrogenated oils (Non-Dairy Creamer, Crackers, Cookies, Chips, Snack Bars) 3. Nitrates (Hot Dogs, Cold Cuts, Pepperoni, Sausage, Bacon, Liverwurst) 4. Processed Sugars (Candy, Soda, Bread, Bottled Fruit Juice, Cookies, Snack Bars) 5. Nightshades (Potatoes, Peppers, Tomatoes, Eggplant, Paprika) 6. Convenience Foods (French Fries, Onion Rings, Loaded Baked Potatoes, Fatty Burgers, Mexican Food, Pizza, Calzones, Stromboli) 7. Processed White Flour Products (Flour, Bread, Pasta, Pizza, Crackers, Pretzels, Donuts) Are you surprised?

It is precisely the absorption of the nutrients in the colon and intestines from the food we eat that prevents, causes or cures what ails us.

My biggest problem during the postwar period was the doom and gloom of its most celebrated thinkers. I didn’t share their negativity about the human condition. I had studied how primates resolve conflicts, sympathize with each other, and seek cooperation. Violence is not their default condition. Most of the time, they live in harmony. The same applies to our own species. I was shocked, therefore, in 1976 when Dawkins asserted in The Selfish Gene, “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.”6 I’d argue quite the contrary! Without our long evolution as intensely social beings, we’d be unlikely to care for our fellow humans. We have been programmed to pay attention to each other and offer help when needed. What else would be the point of living in groups? Many animals do, and they do so only because group life, which includes giving and receiving assistance, yields tremendous advantages over a solitary life. One time Dawkins and I politely disagreed in person. On a cold November morning, I took him and a cameraman up a tower at the Yerkes Field Station. It overlooked the chimps that I knew so well. I pointed out Peony, an old female. Her arthritis was so acute that we had seen younger females hurry to fetch water for her. Instead of letting Peony slowly trek to the water faucet, they’d run ahead of her to suck up a mouthful and return to spit it into her mouth, which she opened wide. They also sometimes placed their hands on her ample behind to push her up into the climbing frame so that she could join a cluster of grooming friends. Peony received this aid from individuals unrelated to her, who surely couldn’t expect any favors in return because she was not in a condition to deliver them. How to explain such behavior? And how to explain all the acts of kindness that we ourselves engage in every day, sometimes with complete strangers? Dawkins tried to salvage his theory by blaming genes, saying that they must be “misfiring.” Genes, however, are little strings of DNA devoid of intentions. They do what they do without any goals in mind, which means that they can’t be selfish or unselfish. They also can’t accidentally miss any goals.

If you’re like most people, a string of nerve-racking incidents keeps you in fight-or-flight response—and out of homeostasis—a large part of the time. Maybe the car cutting you off is the only actual life-threatening situation you encounter all day, but the traffic on the way to work, the pressure of preparing for a big presentation, the argument you had with your spouse, the credit-card bill that came in the mail, the crashing of your computer hard drive, and the new gray hair you noticed in the mirror keep the stress hormones circulating in your body on a near-constant basis. Between remembering stressful experiences from the past and anticipating stressful situations coming up in your future, all these repetitive short-term stresses blur together into long-term stress. Welcome to the 21st-century version of living in survival mode. In fight-or-flight mode, life-sustaining energy is mobilized so that the body can either run or fight. But when there isn’t a return to homeostasis (because you keep perceiving a threat), vital energy is lost in the system. You have less energy in your internal environment for cell growth and repair, long-term building projects on a cellular level, and healing when that energy is being channeled elsewhere. The cells shut down, they no longer communicate with one another, and they become “selfish.” It’s not time for routine maintenance (let alone for making improvements); it’s time for defense. It’s every cell for itself, so the collective community of cells working together becomes fractured. The immune and endocrine systems (among others) become weakened as genes in those related cells are compromised when informational signals from outside the cells are turned off. It’s like living in a country where 98 percent of the resources go toward defense, and nothing is left for schools, libraries, road building and repair, communication systems, growing of food, and so on. Roads develop potholes that aren’t fixed. Schools suffer budget cuts, so students wind up learning less. Social welfare programs that took care of the poor and the elderly have to close down. And there’s not enough food to feed the masses. Not surprisingly, then, long-term stress has been linked to anxiety, depression, digestive problems, memory loss, insomnia, hypertension, heart disease, strokes, cancer, ulcers, rheumatoid arthritis, colds, flu, aging acceleration, allergies, body pain, chronic fatigue, infertility, impotence, asthma, hormonal issues, skin rashes, hair loss, muscle spasms, and diabetes, to name just a few conditions (all of which, by the way, are the result of epigenetic changes). No organism in nature is designed to withstand the effects of long-term stress.

his first day at Pharmstar, Mazzio had sat in when Iron Jack briefed newly-hired business school graduates on strategy. ‘I want the next Prozac or Valium, the next Lipitor or Zantac,’ Jack had said, striding up and down, his big voice booming across the hall. ‘I want you to scour the world for billion-dollar-a-year blockbusters. Between you and me you can screw the cure for cancer as a financial proposition. What we need are treatments, not cures. Treatments that patients take every day, year in, year out. The clinical areas are obvious: depression, migraine, back pain, arthritis, cholesterol control, weight control. And the target market is only one: first world and affluent.

I have just taught Soli to make borscht! Yesterday I bought beets with big, glossy leaves still caked with wet soil. Naneh washed them in the tub until her arthritis flared, but she's promised to make dolmas with the leaves. After we closed Soli tucked the beets under coals and roasted them all night. When I woke up I smelled caramel and winter and smoke. It made me so hungry, I peeled a hot, slippery one for breakfast and licked the ashes and charred juices off with my burnt fingertips. Noor, bruised from betrayal, remembered borscht, remembered stirring sour cream into the broth and making pink paisley shapes with the tip of her spoon, always surprised by the first tangy taste, each time anticipating sweetness. Her mother had called it a soup for the brokenhearted. She marveled at her father's enthusiasm for borscht, when for thirty years each day had been a struggle. Another man would've untied his apron long ago and left the country for a softer life, but not Zod. He would not walk away from his courtyard with its turquoise fountain and rose-colored tables beneath the shade of giant mulberry trees, nor the gazebo, now overgrown with jasmine, where an orchestra once played and his wife sang into the summer nights.

Anyone Can Deal With Arthritis With These Simple Tips There is more than one type of arthritis and it is important to know what you have before you can begin proper treatment. If you find this fact helpful, then read this article because it contains even more helpful advice in order to help you live comfortably in the face of this painful condition. If you have rheumatoid arthritis, measure your pain. Use a scale of one to ten to let yourself know how difficult a new task is for you to accomplish. Take a measurement before the task, and again after. This will let you know how that task is effecting your body, and your life. It is important that you have enough calcium in your diet if you suffer from arthritis. Medical research has proven that inflammatory arthritis conditions are worse if a person does not have enough calcium in their diet. You can find calcium in many different foods, including milk, cheese, and ice cream. Lose weight to help reduce your arthritis symptoms. Losing even a few pounds has been shown to take pressure off of weight bearing joints and reduce the pain that you suffer with arthritis. It can also help reduce your risk of developing osteoarthritis of the knee and can slow the rate in which your arthritis progresses. Maintaining a healthy body weight reduces the stress placed on arthritic joints. Carrying around extra wait can place an enormous amount of stress on arthritic joints. Do not skip meals or deny yourself food in order to shed pounds, but adhere to a diet that provides your body with the necessary nutrients. Try hot wax for relief. While heating pads can give great relief when used, they do not completely touch every painful spot. Warm wax envelopes your entire hand or foot, giving you complete relief to the painful areas. Make sure the wax is not too hot, and do not use it too often, or you may cause more irritation than you fix. Make sure to eat plenty of fruits and vegetables if you want to help ease the effects of arthritis. Fruits and vegetables are healthy for all people, but for people with arthritis, they are especially helpful because they have vitamins and nutrients that help to build healthy joints and reduce joint inflammation. Let the sun in. Vitamin D has been shown to help relieve some symptoms of arthritis, and sunshine is well-known for increasing positive thoughts and bettering moods. Opening your blinds for around fifteen minutes every day can be enough to give you some great benefits, while still being in the comfort of your home. Add ginger to your food. Ginger is well known for relieving inflammation and stiffness, so adding a few grams a day to your foods can help you reap the benefits of this healthy plant. Ginger and honey drinks are the best method, as honey also gives some of the same benefits. In conclusion, you know not only that there is more than one type of arthritis that can develop, but there are different ways to identify and treat it. Hopefully you will find this information usefu visit spectrumthermography.com and that it will allow you to help yourself or other people that are afflicted with this painful disease.

Turn out all thoughts of doubt and trouble. Never tolerate them for one second. Bar the windows and doors of your soul against them as you would bar your home against a thief who would steal in to take your treasures. What greater treasures can you have than Peace and Rest and Joy? And these are all stolen from you by doubt and fear and despair. Face each day with Love and Laughter. Face the storm. Joy, Peace, Love, My great gifts. Follow Me to find all three. I want you to feel the thrill of protection and safety. Any soul can feel this in a harbor, but real joy and victory come to those alone who sense these when they ride a storm. Say, “all is well.” Say it not as a vain repetition. Use it as you would use a healing balm for cut or wound, until the poison is drawn out; then, until the sore is healed, then, until the thrill of fresh life floods your being. All is well. 1

prospective buyer who knocked on their door in January and found her in a chenille robe, a World War II trench coat, a pair of rubber garden boots, a man’s felt hat, and what appeared to be Uncle Billy’s flannel pajama bottoms. As far as the frozen caller could tell, there was no heat in the house. Being a caring soul, he inquired around and was told that the Presbyterian church had filled up Miss Rose’s oil tank in November, and, on last inspection, it was still full. Most people knew, too, that the old couple walked to Winnie Ivey’s bake shop every afternoon, always hand in hand, to pick up what was left over. Winnie, however, was not one to give away the store. She carefully portioned out what she thought they would eat that night and the next morning, and no more. She didn’t like the idea of Miss Rose feeding her perfectly good day-old Danish to the birds. After their visit to the bake shop, Miss Rose and Uncle Billy, walking very slowly due to arthritis and a half dozen other ailments, dropped by to see what Velma had left at the Main Street Grill. Usually, it was a few slices of bacon and liver mush from breakfast, or a container of soup and a couple of hamburger rolls from lunch. Occasionally, she might add a little chicken salad that Percy had made, himself, that very morning. On balance, it was said, Miss Rose and Uncle Billy fared

Monique is part of a pioneering trial of Tracey’s big idea. The research is being run by Paul-Peter Tak, a rheumatologist at the Academic Medical Center at the University of Amsterdam and GlaxoSmithKline. Tak started with a pilot study of eight patients with long-standing rheumatoid arthritis, who had failed all other treatments. Their implants delivered 60-second bursts of vagal nerve stimulation (VNS), once per day for 42 days. Tak reported in 2012 that six of the patients benefited significantly, with improved symptoms, and reduced levels of inflammation in their blood.

Imbalance of the adrenal hormones is one of the most common conditions I see in my practice. The typical cause is chronic stress, which can result in diminished adrenal function (sometimes called “adrenal exhaustion” or “adrenal fatigue”) and may include the depletion of DHEA. DHEA and cortisol levels are most reliably determined using saliva tests. It takes time to resolve adrenal depletion, which is a condition that typically brews for months, if not years. You can promote adrenal balance by attending to the basics: Learn stress-management techniques, drink plenty of water, and regulate your blood sugar levels by eating small meals throughout the day. Along with potential bone loss, some of the most common symptoms of adrenal imbalance are listed below: • allergies/ asthma • arthritis • chemical sensitivities • morning/ evening fatigue • high blood sugar • inflammation • increased abdominal fat • memory lapses • sleep disturbances • susceptibility to infections • autoimmune illness • sugar cravings • aches and pains • infertility • chronic illness • elevated triglycerides • depression or anxiety • nervousness or irritability

He reaches the gates and pushes them open. There is a central path leading to a large statue of Christ on the cross at the very far end. He walks silently toward Christ, through the sea of souls. Beyond the statue, beyond the garden, are tall beech trees, reaching farther up the hill to the open farmland. Father Mackie crosses himself by the plinth at Christ’s feet. No kneeling for him these days, though, arthritis and Catholicism being an uneasy mix.