What Did you do for your arthiritic symptoms??

Can someone please tell me some good herbs for arthritic symptoms??

Surm 1234,

Arthritis is so painful! I am sorry you have to deal with it. Pirouette gave you some great suggestions! My hubby has had good results with the turmeric.

On pg. 238 of Buhner's Healing Lyme (latest edition), he gives a recipe for Lyme arthritis that he says really works. Here is the recipe!

Ingredients:
1 lb. dried, cut and sifted each of: (not whole or powdered)
nettles, horsetail, dandelion leaf, peppermint leaf, celery seed, tumeric, devil's claw and meadowsweet.

Directions:
Combine all and mix well. Add one cup of the mixed herbs to 1/2 gallon of nearly boiling water and allow to steep overnight. Drink 3-4 cups daily.

He said it tastes pretty good too!

I hope you find something that will help!

Apologies for a non-herbal response, but I have had such an incredible experience this past week with pain relief in my knees that I just gotta share. Until recently, just getting in or out of a chair, or walking stairs, was a slow and painful process. I have developed the habit of using my arms to take as much weight as possible when I do these motions, to ease the pain as much as possible.

Then, a while back I happened to be searching the web for a solvent that would help me dissolve epoxy. In the course of that search I stumbled across the compound Dimethyl Sulfoxide, commonly known as DMSO. I'm sure others here in this forum have heard of this, but it was completely new to me. DMSO is a great solvent and very handy for the industrial application I had in mind. But the really astonishing thing is that it also happens to have completely eliminated the pain in my knees. It took a few days to reach full effect, but even the first day I felt so much better I could not believe it.

After using it once at full strength, undiluted, and then once at half strength, I have now settled into using a very weak topical application done once per day. I mix pure DMSO with distilled water in the ratio of 10% DMSO and 90% distilled water. The amount of this mixture used in a single application is very small, about 1.5 ml rubbed in to each knee.

There is a huge amount of literature on DMSO so I am not going to get long-winded with details. I am only going to mention enough info to hopefully motivate people to do their own research. DMSO is safe, with a toxicity about half that of ethanol. It does have some approved medical uses but by and large the medical establishment has little interest or knowledge of this compound. It can't be patented so big pharma isn't interested. And since DMSO is produced by the ton as a byproduct of making paper - it's cheap and easy to get.

If you have arthritic pain of any kind, or know someone who is suffering, please try DMSO. There are many, many other benefits to DMSO but the one I can personally vouch for is that it has given me back my knees.

Of course there's a catch. A couple, in fact. The most important one is safety - DMSO passes through your skin like water through sponge. And since it is an excellent solvent it can dissolve and carry all kinds of substances right along with it as you soak it up. So any skin you put it on needs to be super-clean. Any object in contact with DMSO like containers, mixing and measuring tools, all need to be very clean. The other catch is that it tends to give the user a garlicky body odor. In my case I am using a very weak mixture so although I do notice it, the scent is minimal. Personally I don't care if I smell like the dumpster behind an Italian restaurant if it means my knees don't hurt.

DMSO can be quite irritating to the skin, especially after the first few applications, and lasting up to a couple hours in my case. But others have noted and I can confirm from experience that the occurrence of irritation decreases with use. After a week of use I now have only a mild itch for about 30 minutes after application, and this continues to improve.

Everybody should know about DMSO, it should be common household knowledge and we should all have a bottle on hand. I'm a guy who is open to alternative medicine and always have been, and yet somehow this stuff never made it on to my radar. So I am going to be hollering long and loud to spread the word, because this substance is a Very Big Deal indeed, and could really help countless people if more of us know about it. Sorry I am not going to provide links to research literature or DMSO vendors in this post, but it's easy to find this info anyway and I don't want to appear to have any kind of commercial agenda.

Bottom line, by all means do try herbal remedies, but please also get you some DMSO and try it. For me the pain relief has been borderline miraculous.

I

Hi Girlie, thank you for the welcome. My knee problems are from Lyme, but I should mention that I have never been officially diagnosed with Lyme. My daughter was diagnosed, had the classic rash and a fever, treated with the standard brutal course of antibiotics. That was when I was first plunged into the unhappy world of Lyme, and how I later recognized my own infection. I never bothered to see a doctor about it, or did any blood work because I knew by then that the test results are never conclusive, and virtually all doctors' responses are the same, they whip out the scrip pad and write the name of something that will trash your immune system, digestive flora, etc. And maybe it takes out the Lyme, maybe not.

When my knees started to get bad almost overnight, I knew what it was. (We lived near Gettysburg at the time, where the ticks and Lyme are rampant). I did the Salt/Vit C thing for several months, in combination with juice fasting, and that gave me about 3 years of relief. This past year the knee pain came back with a vengeance and I found I could no longer tolerate the Salt/C. I have just been living with it assuming canes, walkers, and wheelchairs were somewhere on my horizon. That's all changed thanks to my new best friend DMSO.

I'm delighted (and not at all surprised) to hear that your husband had such good results from DMSO and avoided surgery. I can sympathize with your experience of the odor, and I think I have the solution. We just need everybody on the planet to use a little DMSO every day so we all smell the same. :) That might put a few orthopedic surgeons out of work but I'm fine with that.

Freeman, glad the DMSO worked for you. It seems to help a lot of people with muscle and joint pain.

DMSO is just one more on the long list of things that provided no relief for me. I even mixed it with colloidal silver a bunch of times to try to kill the bacteria in my tendons. Never really did anything but burn and make me taste garlic.

"So, is it like eating garlic - if you eat it yourself, you don't smell it on the next person? lol"

Yup, that's my theory. And since I will probably never stop using DMSO now, my best option is to get everyone else on it. :) Since it's an especially potent antioxidant that neutralizes free radicals I figure it's like Vitamin C, you really can't go wrong with it.

I will try to keep this post short so I don't totally hijack Surm1234's thread. It's good to have a couple people chime in with their experience of no-improvement from DMSO, balanced discussions are always better. An important point to add is that even if DMSO alone doesn't help, in many cases it might be useful as a way of delivering a substance that does help. Topical DMSO (and whatever is mixed with it) shows up in the blood 5 minutes after application, and in bone a little later. Seriously deep tissue penetration.

Ok, I will now take my DMSO soapbox out of this thread in the hope that others will continue to chime in with responses to the original poster. Surm1234 I hope you give DMSO a try and post your results here, that would be awesome.

I LOVE this thread. Thank you. Freeman you are hysterical. Love "don't care if I smell like a dumpster." LOL!

My son has chronic tendonitis in his knees. Do you think it might work? Here is my concern - we are all SUPER PALE with very sensitive skin (the kind of skin that never, ever tans). Perhaps I can dilute it.

Surm, I get joint pain since lyme (that is was my main symptom) and I'm concerned for future arthritis. I don't have walking trouble or anything - so far mild. I do lots of detox. I spray magnesium oil on my arms/legs and will also put a drop or two of this chinese like tiger balm, herb. Forget the name passionflower or blossomflower. I'll check when I get home Monday night. I take inflammatone and use lots of tumeric and cayenne. I don't have any gluten, dairy, sugar.

I'm trying to remember (and not run upstairs to check) - but I think I bought a cream for myself instead of using my husbands liquid.

I made sure that I had "dedicated" a little paintbrush just for applying it.
My husband stressed that everything (my skin included) had to be very clean.
What brand do you use, freeman?

Some frankensce essential oil and dmso works ok ..bee venom works for a whole two days ...rocephin ..iv curcumin

GH,

Can you expand more on what it is you cut and what it is you now eat? While each person is unique, curious to hear if you feel it was gluten, sugar, etc... Thanks.

GH,

Thank you so much. Wow you are really knowledgeable. I will have to digest all of this. Pardon the pun. I also eat a mainly alkaline diet, although I have been having organic lean protein 1-2 a day but only about 4-6 oz. total. Do you do the PH strips - they are fun to do. Thanks so much!