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10. Ten Natural Ways to Relieve Rheumatoid Arthritis

 

By: Sayer Ji

Date: Monday, 27-Nov-2023

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease that affects more than 1.3 million American adults. It’s characterized by chronic inflammation and targets the bones, cartilage, and connective tissues of the joints.

Inflammation from RA results when the immune system mistakes joints for a hostile invader. It attacks the joints causing cartilage, tissues, and bone to be destroyed. The result is a crippling loss of mobility and function.

But RA can also attack outside the joints. It’s estimated that about 15 to 25 percent of RA patients have this “extra-articular” form of rheumatoid arthritis. This form of RA can manifest as pericarditis, pleuritis, inflammation of blood vessels, eye conditions, and kidney infections. Eventually it can lead to death.

Standard medical treatment for RA includes painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs to suppress symptoms. Drug treatments target the inflammatory process by turning down the body’s inflammation reaction. In some cases steroids, and even chemotherapy drugs like methotrexate are used. And even with drug therapy, a significant number of patients still have persistent, low-level disease activity.

Fortunately a wealth of natural therapies are safe and effective in the treatment of RA, including removing gluten-containing grains and lectin-containing Nightshade foods from the diet. Here are just 10 of the proven ways to relieve rheumatoid arthritis.

1. Probiotics

Patients with rheumatoid arthritis have distinctive changes in their gut and oral microbiome. One Chinese study took fecal, dental, and salivary samples from RA patients and healthy controls. The researchers found specific differences in the microbiomes of the RA patients compared to the controls. For example, RA patients’ levels of the bacteria Haemophilus spp were low while Lactobacillus salivarius was high. They also found that the microbiome of RA patients had an altered ability to metabolize iron, sulfur, zinc and arginine.

EzoicAnd a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-design, clinical pilot trial showed that probiotics can help RA patients. For six weeks, researchers gave 45 RA patients a lactic acid-producing bacteria (LAB) probiotic, or a placebo, in addition to their regular medications. The probiotic used was Bacillus coagulans GBI-30, 6086, an LAB strain that can withstand the low pH of stomach acid.

Patients receiving the probiotic were able to walk two miles, reach, and participate in daily activities. Compared to the placebo, they had improved pain scores, less disability, and reduced C-reactive protein. C-reactive protein (CRP) is a protein that’s produced by the liver. CRP levels in the blood rise in response to inflammation and fall when inflammation wanes.

2. Essential oils

In a Korean study of 40 RA patients researchers provided patients with a mix of essential oils. The blend consisted of lavender, marjoram, eucalyptus, rosemary, and peppermint in proportions of 2:1:2:1:1. They were mixed with a carrier oil composed of almond (45 percent), apricot (45 percent), and jojoba (10 percent) oils diluted to 1.5 percent after blending.

The essential oil blend significantly decreased both the pain score and the depression score of the oils group compared with the control group.

Another randomized, double-blind study of 49 RA patients tested whether evening primrose oil (EPO) could replace NSAID drugs for pain and inflammation. Patients received either a capsule containing EPO, or EPO plus fish oil, or a placebo. After 12 months the groups receiving evening primrose oil alone or with the fish oil had significant subjective improvement in their condition. They also significantly reduced their use of NSAIDs.

And a combination of lemon verbena and omega 3 fats was shown to reduce measures of joint dysfunction and pain by 53 percent and 78 percent.

3. Vitamin D

A deficiency in vitamin D has been linked to rheumatoid arthritis. In one Polish study of 97 RA patients, 76.3 percent were found to be deficient in vitamin D. Researchers also linked vitamin D deficiency to higher RA disease activity and worse quality of life.Ezoic

But supplementing with vitamin D can improve RA. In a study from India, 73 RA patients with low vitamin D levels (below 20 ng/mL) were given 60,000 IU per week of vitamin D for six weeks followed by 60,000 IU per month for a total of three months. On average serum vitamin D levels for the group improved from about 10 ng/mL to about 57. The researchers found that supplementing with vitamin D contributed to significant improvement in disease activity within a short period of time.

And vitamin D can lower the recurrence rate for RA. In a study of 377 RA patients those with low levels were randomly assigned to receive vitamin D or not. After 24 months the vitamin D supplement group had a recurrence rate of only 19 percent compared to 29.5 percent for the group not taking vitamin D.

4. Diet

One theory suggests rheumatoid arthritis may be a reaction to food antigens and that the disease process starts within the intestine. Diet studies seem to support this. Excluding meat, dairy products and cereals from the diet has been shown to improve RA symptoms. The same is true for reducing dietary protein as part of an elimination diet or during fasting.

In fact, a two week elemental diet has been shown to be as effective as a course of prednisone for RA without the side effects. An elemental diet contains amino acids (no whole proteins), mono and di?saccharides, and medium and long?chain triglycerides, supplemented with vitamins and trace elements.

A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition also found vegetarian diets to be beneficial. Researchers put 27 RA patients on a 7 to 10 day fast, followed by a 3.5 month gluten-free, vegan diet, and finally a nine month lacto-vegetarian diet. Compared to 26 controls, the dieting patients improved significantly even a year following the trial. The researchers noted that changes in fecal flora were linked to improvements in the condition.

5. Bee Venom Therapy

A Chinese study of 100 patients found bee venom therapy relieves symptoms, reduces medication, and prevents recurrence of rheumatoid arthritis.

Quantum Researchers treated 100 RA patients with methotrexate, sulfasalazine, and meloxicam. Half of the patients were also treated with bee sting venom at certain acupuncture points once every other day. After three months, both groups significantly improved their scores for joint swelling, joint activity, pain, and pressing pain, grasp force, 15 minute-walking duration, and morning stiffness. But compared to the drugs-only group, the bee venom group had significantly better scores for joint swelling, pain and pressing pain, grasp force, and morning stiffness. The bee venom group was also able to significantly cut their doses of methotrexate and meloxicam. In addition, the relapse rate of the bee-venom group was only 12 percent compared to 32 percent for the drugs-only group.

6. Fish Oil

German researchers in one pilot study found cod liver oil effective for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. They gave 43 RA patients one gram of cod liver oil every day. After three months the patients had a 52.4 percent decrease in morning stiffness; 42.7 percent reduction in painful joints; 40 percent decrease in swollen joints; and a 67.5 percent reduction in pain intensity. And 68 percent of the patients rated the efficacy of the cod liver oil as good or very good.

In a British study cod liver oil reduced that need for pain medication. A group of RA patients were given 10 grams of cod liver oil or a placebo every day. At the end of nine months, 39 percent of the cod liver oil group were able to reduce their NSAID medications by more than 30 percent. Only 10 percent of the placebo group could reduce their pain meds by that much.

Regular fish oil is also effective. Scottish researchers gave 64 RA patients a daily combination of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) or a placebo over 12 months. The group taking fish oil reduced their NSAID usage by 59 percent compared to 16 percent for the placebo group.

7. Pomegranate

In a 12 week pilot study eight RA patients drank 10 ml (0.34 ounces) of pomegranate juice every day. The pomegranate juice reduced the number of tender joints by 62 percent and overall disease activity by 17 percent.

8. Curcumin

Curcumin has been proven superior to a standard rheumatoid arthritis drug. In an Indian study 45 RA patients were divided into three groups. One group took 500 mg of curcumin per day; a second took 50 mg of diclofenac (an NSAID); and a third took both.

The group taking only curcumin had the highest percentage improvement in scores measuring disease activity, and tenderness and swelling of joints. The scores were significantly better than the drug group. The researchers also found that curcumin was safe and did not relate to any adverse events.

9. Thunder God Vine

A randomized trial compared the traditional Chinese herbal medicine thunder god vine (Tripterygium wilfordii Hook F) to an RA drug. Thunder god vine was significantly more effective than methotrexate for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.

Researchers in Peking recruited 207 rheumatoid arthritis patients. The subjects received 20 mg TGV pills three times a day, or methotrexate, or both. After 6 months, 55.1 percent of the TGV patients achieved 50 percent improvement in their condition compared to only 46.4 percent of the methotrexate group. The combination group did even better with 76.8 percent of them improving by 50 percent.

10. Exercise

Other therapies proven to reduce RA pain and stiffness include Tai Chi and yoga.

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About the author:

Sayer Ji is the founder of Greenmedinfo.com, a reviewer at the International Journal of Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine, Co-founder and CEO of Systome Biomed, Vice Chairman of the Board of the National Health Federation, and Steering Committee Member of the Global Non-GMO Foundation.

https://www.greenmedinfo.com/

Note from our Publisher, Jim Homyak:   

A trip to your standard MD, to get help with your Rheumatoid Arthritis, will find you in receipt of a prescription for the dangerous "Colchicine" medication. Of course you won't be told anything about "the danger" but that is up to you to do any homework on the topic.

 

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    THE ABUNDANCE PARADIGM: WHY AI FORCES A RETHINKING OF MONEY ITSELF — PART 1

    By Ellen Brown on May 11, 2026

    A Universal Basic Income (UBI) has long been proposed as a way to cushion the blow of jobs lost to automation. Under that model, everyone receives a modest monthly payment – enough to cover basic needs and prevent extreme poverty. 

    But Elon Musk has gone further. On April 16, he posted on X:

    Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.

    Rather than a subsistence stipend, Universal High Income (UHI) would be a level of income allowing ordinary people to live well in a world where machines do most of the work. Musk has also said that AI and robotics are the only things that can solve the massive U.S. debt crisis. 

    That sounds promising, but where will the government get the money to pay the UHI? Critics say any government that tried it would go bankrupt. There are also other concerns, which will be addressed in Part 2 of this article. Here we will look at the financial underpinnings: why UHI is even thinkable, why AI forces a reexamination of how money enters the economy, why the current system cannot scale to meet what is coming, and the implicit transition needed to meet that challenge.

    Why the Current Money System Cannot Scale

    The national debt of the U.S. government just topped $39 trillion. China’s is $18.7 trillion. Japan’s is $8.6 trillion. Those of the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain are each in the multi-trillion-dollar range. Collective global debt now stands at $353 trillion, 305% of the world’s annual economic output. So even if, hypothetically, everything produced in the world in a year were applied toward liquidating the debt, it still would not be enough to pay it all off. 

    In fact the debt can never be repaid, because of the way money currently enters the system. Nearly all of the money supply today is created by banks when they make loans. Banks do not lend their existing capital. The loan itself creates the money. The bank adds the loan amount to the asset side of its balance sheet and balances that sum with the same amount on the liability side. When the borrower withdraws or transfers the funds, either the bank takes them from its reserves in “vault cash” or the Federal Reserve debits the bank’s digital reserve account at the central bank. But the lending bank typically has funds coming into its reserve account at about the same rate as they are going out, so its reserves are continually replenished. Thus a very small reserve account can support a much larger money creation engine. For decades before the Fed discontinued the reserve requirement in 2020, it hovered at around 10%.

    The chief problem with this debt-based system is the interest, which the bank does not create in its original loan. For a typical long-term loan, interest can double the total tab or more. Where is the money to come from to pay this added liability? Across the system as a whole, it must either come from more borrowing or from existing funds. In the case of governments, that means issuing interest-bearing bonds or tapping taxes and other revenues. The interest on the debt compounds, meaning the government is paying interest on interest. This makes the debt increase exponentially, until it is mathematically unsustainable. Then bankruptcies occur, of banks or even whole governments. Booms turn into busts, and the cycle begins again.

    Today, interest on the federal debt is the second largest budget line item after Social Security, exceeding $1 trillion. Meanwhile, workers are losing jobs to AI/robotics, shrinking the income tax base. The system is clearly unsustainable.

    How to Raise Demand to Scale to the Upcoming Supply

    A Universal High Income would replenish the shrinking tax base by replacing the lost wages of unemployed workers. But where will the money come from to pay the UHI? The only sustainable solution is for the government to issue it interest-free. That does not mean through the Federal Reserve, which creates money in the same way banks do: it buys federal interest-bearing securities with accounting entries. The Fed collects the interest, which it is supposed to return to the Treasury after deducting its costs. But since 2008, its costs include paying interest on the reserves of its participating banks, which consumes its profits. (See my earlier article here.) 

    The only interest-free, debt-free solution that will actually increase the money supply sufficiently to match the projected productivity of AI/robotics is for the money to be issued directly by the Treasury.

    This is not a radical new idea. It is authorized in the U.S. Constitution, which provides in Article 1, Sec. 8, that “The Congress shall have Power To … coin Money [and] regulate the Value thereof .…” Abraham Lincoln used government-issued “Greenbacks” to avoid a crippling debt to British-backed bankers. Debt-free government-issued money was also the funding mechanism by which the American colonists succeeded in creating a thriving economy and liberating themselves from the oppressive yoke of the British Empire.

    In his 1729 pamphlet “A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency,” Benjamin Franklin argued that a lack of currency was a tax on industrious farmers and producers, and that a reliable, locally issued paper currency was the “oil” for the gears of trade. The “Nature and Necessity” of this currency was to facilitate the movement of goods between neighbors. Franklin observed that the British strategy of keeping the colonies short of cash was a method of economic suppression. By forcing the colonies to use gold and silver, which were constantly drained back to London to pay for imports, the Crown kept the colonies in a state of permanent debt and low productivity. When the money supply matched the productive capacity of the people, universal prosperity resulted without inflation. 

    This logic evolved into the “American System of Political Economy” championed by Henry Carey, economic advisor to Abraham Lincoln. He wrote:

    Two systems are before the world… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. … One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.

    In the context of the 21st century, the “oil” that best lowers the friction of trade is debt-free government-issued money similar to Lincoln’s Greenbacks and colonial scrip. Rather than implementing a radical financial innovation, we would be returning to our roots.

    Inflation or Deflation?

    The chief objection to the colonies’ paper “scrip” was that they tended to over-print, so that “demand” (money) outstripped supply. Too much money chasing too few goods produced price inflation. But in the 21st century, we will soon have the opposite problem: too little money chasing too many goods. Machines don’t need food, clothing, shelter, transportation, medical treatment or other services. So who will buy those goods and services? 

    Money needs to be issued to human consumers, and not just to a few wealthy human consumers serving as debt brokers thriving on interest. To create sufficient demand for the voluminous output of AI/robotics, it needs to go to the whole national population, evenly distributed. Not only can UHI work in that sort of abundant supply without producing price inflation; it is actually essential to prevent deflation.

    In a conversation on X, Musk wrote:

    In a normal economy, issuing more money simply increases the dollar price of the existing output of goods & services, meaning people do NOT get more stuff. If AI/robotics massively increase goods & services output, then you actually MUST issue dollars to people or there will be massive disinflation. 

    As paraphrased on Yahoo Finance (reposted from Benzinga), Musk wrote that handing out more dollars becomes a problem only when the economy’s supply of goods and services fails to surge alongside the money supply. His claim is that AI and robotics could lift production so sharply that the bigger risk would be falling prices, not rising ones.

    But aren’t falling prices a good thing? In this case, no. Prices would be falling due to a lack of demand, meaning producers can’t find customers for their products. They wind up laying off workers and eventually going bankrupt. When spread across the whole economy, the result is a deflationary spiral: prices fall, businesses lose revenue, and the economy contracts, not because production is inadequate but because purchasing power is insufficient. The result is recession or depression. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, food was rotting in the fields while people were starving, because they were out of work and had no money to spend. 

    Job cuts from AI are already happening. According to the same Benzinga article:

    Evidence of near-term strain is showing up in corporate announcements: employers disclosed more than 27,000 job cuts linked to AI in the first quarter of 2026, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The outplacement firm said that figure was up 40% from the same period a year earlier. 

    Robert Reich reports that wages are around two-thirds of the typical corporation’s total cost, and that in the first four months of 2026, big U.S. corporations cut over 128,000 jobs. 

    How Soon Will All This Happen?

    Another Benzinga article, reposted on Yahoo Finance on March 16, detailed Musk’s projected time frame:

    Speaking remotely to the Abundance Summit last week, Musk told XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis that the global economy is on the verge of an explosion so massive it defies historical precedent.

    “I’d say the economy is 10 times its current size in 10 years,” Musk said, before quickly clarifying that the growth could be even more explosive. “Greater than,” he added, framing the projected shift in economic output as a “fairly comfortable prediction.” …

    Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, sees AI reaching Artificial General Intelligence (human-level intelligence across virtually all domains) by 2029, and full transformative abundance by 2045.

    Other experts question these time projections, but a radical transformation of traditional manufacturing and trade is likely to happen sometime in the reasonably near future. The question is, will the money system transition soon enough to rescue all the laid-off workers from homelessness and famine?

    The Sovereign Wealth Fund Alternative

    There is another model for distributing the gains of automation, one that can be phased in gradually as the AI workforce expands. It comes from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. In an ironic twist, Altman and Musk, who jointly founded OpenAI in 2015, are now locked in a high-profile legal battle over whether Altman diverted Musk’s $44 million investment to transform what was conceived as a nonprofit “for the benefit of humanity” into a highly lucrative for-profit enterprise.

    That dispute aside, Altman’s alternative model for sharing AI-generated wealth is a national sovereign wealth fund seeded by the profits of AI and robotics. His proposed American Equity Fund would take public stakes in the companies and technologies driving automation, capture a portion of the resulting productivity gains, and distribute them as universal dividends. The Fund would not replace a Universal High Income but would complement it.

    This approach has several advantages. It ties payments directly to real output, scales automatically with productivity, and can be introduced gradually, avoiding the shock of issuing large payments before the supply side has fully expanded. It would resemble the Alaska Permanent Fund, which distributes oil revenues to residents, except that here the resource would be the most powerful general-purpose technology since electricity.

    Conclusion: A New Monetary Logic for a New Productive Era

    For centuries, money has been issued as a claim against the future productivity of human labor, repaid from the income that labor generates. The logic of this debt-based system collapses when machines become the primary producers of goods and services. Then the limiting factor becomes purchasing power — the ability of human beings to access the abundance their own technologies create. That requires a monetary architecture that expands with output rather than debt, and distributes income not through wages alone but through mechanisms tied to the productive capacity of the whole system.

    Universal High Income and a sovereign wealth fund are two ways of doing that. One ensures a stable floor of demand; the other ensures that the public shares in the gains of automation. Both would be grounded in real production. But for the public to have access to those gains, the money supply needs to expand in proportion to the expanding pool of goods and services. This can be done by restoring the innovation our forefathers baked into the Constitution: debt-free money issued by the government itself.

    How to fund a UHI without triggering inflation or driving the government into bankruptcy is the first objection critics raise, but there are others. They argue that people would stop working or stop learning, that society would collapse into idleness or chaos, that life would lose meaning without jobs, that the government would have the power to control how people spend their money.  Will a UHI ring in the promised utopia or lock us into a state-controlled digital prison? Part 2 of this article will address those concerns. 

    _______________

    This article was first posted as an original to ScheerPost.com. Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. Her 400+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.tom of Form

     

     

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    WAY TO GO MR PUTIN - RUSSIA FINALIZES 'LBGTQ PROPAGANDA' BAN

    Posted By: The_Fox [Send E-Mail]
    Date: Thursday, 1-Dec-2022 05:31:08
    www.rumormill.news/212414

     

    Many a time I often think about moving to Russia, so sick and tired of living here in the West.

    Over there things get done and child molesters etc don't just get away with a slapped wrist, free to again prey on the innocent.

    Those promoting society's moral decay will now have to answer for their actions also.

    Way to go Mr Putin.

    Read more: 'LBGTQ PROPAGANDA' BAN

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