How did I Get Arthritis?

It’s a process.  It’s the result of injury.  Many are told it’s normal with age.  It’s common, it’s not normal in that everyone does not have it.  Only the people who’ve injured their joint somewhere along the way get arthritis at that joint.  As for age, yes… it takes awhile to develop so you have to survive your injury and then live another 10 or 30 years to have arthritis develop.

We know it’s not normal because not everyone has arthritis.  Also, you can have an arthritic right knee but a normal left knee.  If age were the cause, both knees are the same age! 

The process is, injury to the ligaments (protectors of joint range of motion), tendon (the “strings” on the end of the muscle that move the joint) and the cartilage itself.  One or all of these elements can start the process.

If you injure the cartilage itself, that’s going to deteriorate rapidly.  That’s not typical.  But you can see that damage as arthritis on an X-ray within 3-5 years of injury.   It’s more often damage to the ligaments and tendons that over time, cause the joint to lose it’s range of motion and nutrition and that’s why the cartilage deteriorates.  That’s a 10-30 year process.

The reason the cartilage deteriorates is when the joint no longer moves across its full range, the fluid within the joint doesn’t wash across the surface of all of the cartilage and the cartilage gets its nutrition from the fluid, not the underlying bone.  The edges of the joint go bad, the person loses range in that joint, which further advances the degeneration process.  It becomes a cascade of accelerating degeneration once range of motion is lost. You just keep losing more.

Having an arthritic knee is one thing, having an arthritic spine is another far worse problem.  It causes neurologic problems that other joints don’t. 

First, if the arthritic spine includes disc height loss, that means the space between vertebra where the nerve comes out becomes narrowed and more and more frequently impinges on the nerve exiting at that level.  This is extremely common.  People describe having to sleep with one arm over their head or they can’t rest their arm on the armrest in their car or their hand goes to “sleep”.  That’s not an arm or hand problem, that’s an old injury in the neck problem.  We can absolutely help that by restoring the normal alignment and range of the joint.

The other problem is more complex.  It turns out that about half of the information your brain processes coming from the body comes from receptors on spinal joints.  Only half of your brain handles what you feel, what temperature it is, where your foot is, what you’re smelling, seeing and tasting….  A whole HALF of your brain is devoted to the sensory receptors around the joints in your spine.  So, when they lose their range of motion, they are not able to send complete information to your brain anymore.  And that renders the response from the brain to whatever’s going on, inaccurate.  Think like the letter “B” doesn’t work on your computer keyboard or phone.  I actually had this and had to buy a new phone because of it.   It was a dead section of screen so the B and N would not register any longer.  For a time I had to use my brains version of a thesaurus to reword sentences without a B or N.  But, (see that?, couldn’t write that word) my last name starts with B and many other words have a B or N in them.  It was quite a task and very frustrating.   Eventually, I got a new phone to correct this.  

So, the same thing is happening in your brain when your spine is damaged and joints can’t send the information to your brain to register what’s going on outside.  Which then means, the brain can’t determine what to send back.  Resting muscle tone for instance, resulting in spasms.  Sometimes imperceptible but enough to cause damage to the tendons and nerves in the carpal tunnel, necessitating and carpal tunnel surgery.  All from damaged joints in the neck. 

So, what to do?  First, it sounds like a broken record but, get checked for misaligned spinal joints regularly.  First to realign and second, it restores the normal range, thereby preventing degeneration and arthritis.  Now that said, you CAN injure a joint so badly that even restoring the alignment and range won’t fully prevent arthritis.  It DOES slow the process down and in the meantime, normalize the nervous system’s messages.

Nutritionally, understand the tissue makeup.  Cartilage itself is mainly chrondroitin and so, chondroitin sulfate is the supplement you can take. Your body makes it but if you supplement it in your diet it makes it much easier for your body to repair what can be repaired.  It typically comes with glucosamine sulfate about 50/50 and that makes it work even better.

And the process is inflammatory by nature, you need a little, but the way most of us eat, we all have too much inflammation, which is like gasoline on that damage.  So, less inflammatory food, which is pretty much sugar and things to turn into sugar (bread, crackers, rice…. Etc).

Add fish oil for extra credit.