Biking-Severe Arthritis-Vitamins-Supplements

[pardes]

If you can stay limber and cycle frequently, that will

You are right about that. Doing a minimum of 30 minutes a day commuting has made a tremendous difference already.

SAM-e sent my blood pressure sky-high.

I tried it but found it led to severe lower GI tract distress....not a pretty thing on a bike!

I'm generally skeptical of mainstream medicine doing research on supplements, not because I assume any direct bias, but because the studies are often designed around forms of the supplement that are already known to be the least effective.

Yes, indeed, if you look long enough you can find a study to support any position you wish to take. However, there is good stuff out there and I try things and see what helps.

[Zen]

I ran across my cane the other day. Hoping I won't be using that anytime soon.

Mine's in the Jeep
just in case...

[sundial]

Mine's in the Jeep
just in case...

Might come in handy with unruly Christmas shoppers.

[Trek420]

Pardes, I found staying away from processed foods, and things that are white in color helped me more than anything. Sugar, flour, white potatoes, pasta, milk products, etc causes my arthritis to flare up big time. Also, shade plants such as tomatoes and eggplant don't do me any favors.

If you can stay limber and cycle frequently, that will help more than any supplement in my opinion.

+1,000,000 best tip yet!

Keep moving, ditch the junk. Paint with your food, lots of colorful fruits and veggies.

The processed food is more of a weight issue to me. There are foods with anecdotal evidence of help for arth and I eat those but no need to discuss that. You have to move the joint.

But if you do eat processed foods stop. Not that any of us are overweight or that it's any issue

When it comes to arth it's pure simple engineering. Every pound you drop is like hundreds of pounds less pressure on the knee. Every ounce of muscle you gain is like a replacement for the joints.

I was told alternatively or in addition to weight loss to strengthen the large surrounding muscles on the knee. Climb stairs, climb a hill, strengthen the hamstrings and quads, ciimb, climb, climb.

My knee joints are heading to bone on bone with no surgical option out. I was told take weight off them and/or strengthen the surrounding muscles so they do the work of my decrepit joints.

It was explained to me thus by my orthopedic surgeon:
"you have a sedentary body but an active lifestyle. You have two choices. Either change your lifestyle to fit your knee that is go sedentary, or change your knee to fit your lifestyle. If you want to go sedentary fine. Then we don't have to talk. Go home, the knees will continue to hurt and hurt more, soon you'll have all the effects of a sedentary lifestyle but you really don't need the joint to sit at a desk and drive to and from home so why bother? If you want to change the knee here's a Rx for PT, but really just go ... ride .... your .... bike"

I picked the latter and that was 3 AIDS rides ago. 4 if you count leading training rides

Pills may help. All they can hurt is your wallet.

But movement especially cycling is the best pill of all. My knees anyway "like circles". My knees don't like impact, they really don't like lateral movement, but they like doing circles. And cycling has circles!

[OakLeaf]

interesting article from a couple of days ago on the lack of correlation between pain and findings on imaging -

my favorite pull quote:

The question, though, was whether it helped the patients and their doctors to know what the M.R.I.’s had found. And the answer, Dr. Modic reported, is that it did not. The patients who knew recovered no faster than those who did not know. However, Dr. Modic said, there was one effect of being told — patients felt worse about themselves when they knew they had a bulging disk.

“If I tell you that you have a degenerated disk, basically I’m telling you you’re ugly,” Dr. Modic said.