By Ellen Denton
I’ve had arthritis for years, but I have never taken a single pharmaceutical medication for the condition. To this day, I can easily hike five miles, and I rarely have pain. How, you may wonder, is this possible. The simple answer is homeopathics.
I was first diagnosed with arthritis by a medical doctor who had been practicing for more than 30 years. He was an honest fellow who told me that the Western medical handlings for arthritis weren’t very good, and if my condition persists, I would do better looking into homeopathic remedies.
I was living in sunny California at the time and the arthritis was mild, but when my father became ill and required emergency surgery I made a trip to cold, rainy New York for a week to be with him. The drastic climate change triggered the most sudden and severe arthritic symptoms I had ever experienced. My hands became stiff, unbending claws of pain. Since I couldn’t even pull on my socks, I wore pants with legs that covered the tops of my shoes so that my father wouldn’t notice my bare ankles. It was so bad that when I went to leave his apartment to visit him in the hospital, I couldn’t get the door open. I couldn’t close my hands around the door knob and finally got out by maneuvering it with my wrists.
My biggest concern was my father seeing this. I didn’t want him to worry about me or become alarmed when he saw that I couldn’t bend my fingers. However, I knew it would soon become obvious because he would want me to play cards with him at the hospital, and I wouldn’t be able to do it. I needed a solution and I needed it fast, so I found a nearby store that sold homeopathic items. I had never used them before, but I remembered what the doctor told me. The condition was so severe at the time I seriously doubted anything would help, but I had nothing to lose. I did not want to take pharmaceutical drugs, with their often potentially dangerous side effects.
I found a homeopathic remedy for arthritis with no known side effects, which cost me all of $6.
It involved taking the liquid remedy with an eyedropper every 20 minutes over a two-hour period, and then once every two hours after that if needed. After the first two doses I could again move my fingers well enough to shuffle a deck of cards. I took a few more doses, but didn’t even need to do it for the full two hours because the pain had completely vanished. By the time I finished visiting my father and left for the day to return to his apartment, I was completely back to normal.
I continued to use the homeopathic remedy whenever I had an arthritis problem, and that one $6-bottle lasted almost two months. It worked every time without fail, and it didn’t have a single side effect. Based on this success, I also have used homeopathic remedies for the flu, and in less than 24 hours all of the virus’ full-blown symptoms (chills, fever, and exhaustion), were gone! Other people I knew who had gotten that same virus languished in bed for days, sick and suffering.
The Alternatives
I recently read about a multimillion dollar lawsuit against a pharmaceutical company concerning a well-known and heavily advertised arthritis medication that was settled a few years ago. The drug offered no better pain relief than many far less expensive, non-prescription alternatives and actually increased users’ risk of death from a heart attack or stroke, a side effect the company had reportedly already known about for years but failed to disclose. I later looked the drug up on Drugs.com and it listed about 60 possible side effects from the medication followed by the statement, “This is not a complete list of all side effects that may occur.” If this wasn’t so disturbing, it would be laughable. I found similar information when randomly looking up other frequently advertised pharmaceutical arthritis medications.
Not long ago when I was at a doctor’s office for an appointment with my husband, in chit-chatting with the doctor, I mentioned that the only physical condition I had was arthritis. He asked what I took for it, and I told him nothing but homeopathics, or other natural drug-free remedies, when needed. He didn’t believe that such things worked and nonsensically said, “You can’t believe everything you read on the Internet.” It was as if he had been preprogrammed by the pharmaceutical companies to deny the possible effectiveness of anything not given via expensive prescriptions.I beg to differ.
If you are faced with cost-prohibitive medications, especially ones that are potentially dangerous, look further. You may find pearls for pennies.
It’s true you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet, and there are many scam-based “cures” around, but you certainly can’t believe every ad you read in a medical journal either.
Ellen Denton is a freelance writer living in the Rocky Mountains with her husband and two demonic cats who wreak havoc on a regular basis (the cats, not the husband). She has been published in You and Me, Fed Caps Words about Work, Greenprints, and Animal Wellness magazines, and a Spruce Mountain Press anthology. Ellen also took 4th place in the “Echoes of the Right to God” international essay contest, and twice was a finalist in a Scinti’s creative nonfiction story contest.
(If you check prominent Internet homeopathic remedy providers you can find similar products such as Liddell Laboratories AR Arthritis with Cartilage.)