Finding Ways: Recovering from Rheumatoid Arthritis Through Alternative Medicine - Softcover

Nies, Barbara Jay

9780965364867: Finding Ways: Recovering from Rheumatoid Arthritis Through Alternative Medicine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0965364860 ISBN 13: 9780965364867

Publisher: Synchrony Pub, 1997

A journal of one woman's descent into the hell of severe, crippling, deforming Rheumatoid Arthritis; her successes-turned-to-failures with conventional treatments - gold salts injections, penicillamine, Oraflex, methotrexate, joint replacement, bone resections, tendon transplants, etc. - and her return to normal living through sustained successes with alternative treatments including fasting, homeopathy, acupuncture, and others.

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From the Publisher:

There is a growing number of reports written by medical experts for medical experts on the clinical treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis. There are many books written by psychologista offering advice to victims on how to live with this disease which afflicts so many and completely cripples some. This is a first-hand report written by someone who has actually lived with the disease since 1970 and has made herself a lay expert on all of the above and more. This book will add a vital, flesh-and-blood third dimension to the flat picture presented by double-blind science, to which RA is still a mystery disease.

Barbara Jay Nies is an authority by virtue of thirty years personal experience and study. She was a model "compliant" patient. She had excellent health insurance, access to the best medical centers, teaching hospitals, and state-of-the-art techniques. She kept all her appointments, experienced a brief bloom of success with each conventional treatment, and quickly slid backwards into debility and depression every time. In 1992 she summoned the courage to strike out on her own to educate herself on what else might be available and she managed to find her way back to normal life no longer dominated by Rheumatoid Arthritis.

From the Author:

It took six years to get a doctor to put a label on the disease which was causing me so much pain and so badly distorting my life but in 1976 I was finally given the diagnosis of Rheumatoid Arthritis, an incurable chronic disease. This doctor, the first of many rheumatologists who were to treat me over the following fifteen years, assured me that researchers were very, very close to finding both the cause of and the cure for this autoimmune condition that had already caused such limitation and loss in the quality of my life. Sit tight, I was told, and take the 24 aspirin tablets daily and the weekly injections which would hold the disease at bay for the year or two - five at most - needed until the true and final cure was readily available. I was also warned against the quack remedies I might hear about and admonished to hang on because the cavalry was on its way.

After fifteen years of short-lived successes and ultimate failures with virtually every medication and procedure then available, and in tremendous fear and trepidation, I tried alternative medicine. And I succeeded.

I've just passed the 8.5 year mark of being about 90% symptom-free and the only medication I routinely take is one Bufferin in the morning and one each evening.

I put this book together, not to persuade RA patients whose therapies are working to change anything, but to offer a measure of hope to long-term RA patients for whom no therapy has been effective, one more resort for those who have exhausted every conventional last resort - and who might be ready to research their own ways to recovery.

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