Arthritis in base of Thumbs

[Georg Sørtun]

Right, I noticed no effect of hemp oil … until after about 5-6 weeks of use I noticed that a bone-spur on my left wrist had all but disappeared, and that there were no longer any swelling around any joints in my body. As hemp oil was the only addition/change/supplement to my general diet or way of life for the last couple of years, I found no other reason for the improvements, and still don't since the effects are lasting. A few months without the hemp oil – as I sometimes run out and only order when I'm in the US – and the old symptoms slowly start showing again.

What I use, is not medicine with more or less immediate effect. It is food – part of my adjusted diet.

Those who want, or need, a noticeable effect more quickly, should pay close attention to what Douglas and Gary write.

[Bobby Nelson]

I've had hand problems for years - it's what caused me to quit playing 6-string. I thought it was diabetic neuropathy but, this year my Dr gave me some pills that I took for 3 months. I told her I quit taking them because the hadn't done a thing. he said,"well then you don't have diabetic neuropathy". She looked at my hands and said," You have a bad case of carpel tunnel". This is a little bit of a relief because the problem can be partially (not totally at my stage of development unfortunately) reversed with surgery. I'm planning to have the surgery next winter (I have to pay for my new MSA first haha). You can look at the meaty part of your palm right under your thumb to see if you have it. If it's gone far enough, you will see a definite deterioration of the muscle (in my case it looks as if it's almost gone and there is nothing but skin there). I suppose it came from 30 + yrs of driving big trucks and heavy equipment where gear shifters and controls vibrate violently and force you to use your hands in un-natural ways for 12 hrs at a time. And, 40 yrs of playing guitar may have had some effect too - but it's mostly the work I've done. They also said I had some form of arthritis in my palms that indicates years of holding things that vibrate - I think she was trying to get me to say motorcycles haha. With any luck, I will get a lot of my abilities with my hands back after the surgery - at this point, I have really no fine control with them or feeling in them. I've heard very good things about it.

[Fred Treece]

+1 on CBD oil.

I didn’t bring it up because it is a dietary supplement, which always seems to strike a nerve in blogs and forums. Nobody likes to be told what to eat. There may be a legal issue in some states; not sure about that. Also, it is a natural remedy and takes time to have an effect, which causes somewhat impatient people to conclude that it is not working.

Good luck with the surgery, Bobby. I think in some cases it is the only choice.

[Jim Smith]

Mine was osteoarthritis in the thumb to wrist joints. My right hand went first, I couldn't twist a door knob or even hold a coffee scoop. I had that one fixed in the 90s, I think. It worked great and it only took a couple months of therapy to recover.

The surgeon called it the "anchovy procedure". He used half of a tendon in my arm to wrap around and replace the missing cartilage in the joint. I had the left side done in the early 2000s. That one recovered even quicker and I haven't had any trouble with either one since.

[Barry Blackwood]

+1 on CBD oil.

I didn’t bring it up because it is a dietary supplement, which always seems to strike a nerve in blogs and forums. Nobody likes to be told what to eat. There may be a legal issue in some states; not sure about that.

This may help explain states involvement or non-involvement.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10 ... 365ac0bab9

[Fred Treece]

LOL Barry

[ajm]

Reviving the discussion after a month or so.

John Billings, questions for you:
- What are the problems you were dealing with?
- What herbs/mixtures were you using that worked for you?

Thanks in advance.

[David Mason]

Well I missed out first time around, I was probably busy re-upholsering my soapbox...so:
Lots of ideas - and ALL of them may work for some people, work better in some conjunction with others, I think that everything beside "stop playing music" is a worth a try. I've had to seriously let go of the bass and six-string just to let some stuff heal, turning down actual paying gigs... remember them? And I spent most of last year doing serious, timed-out science experiments on myself. It may sound funny as in humorous and/or insane, but then, the option - "quitting music" - is akin to brain death for me - learned THAT the hard way - I've never run across anything besides music that made sense to me. (For some odd reason I've had three separate friends who were WAY deep into theoretical math, mathematical physics, “string theory,” the 12th dimension hoopla - and supposedly math does this too? Makes “sense” I mean. But I never ask a nerd lizard/psycho-math for the E-Z, Cliff's Notes version anymore - they're liable to drop a meteorite on you or something. Just the fact that you CAN make a living chasing really weee-rd numbers around inside a humming, glowing box... cool!)

Experiment? All that stuff about isolating causes and NOT changing two or more things at a time is the only way to get information that can GO somewhere, lead you in correct directions. Look up independent and dependent variables, "experimental design;" umm golly stuff like this:
http://www.statisticshowto.com/experimental-design/

Draw up a list of what you may see as causes, HOW you think a particular causation or causal chain works, and prepare to spend at least two months on each, sometimes doing something that you know darn well isn't making you better, but you can really only evaluate each variable one-at-a-time. Change five things at once - what worked? WHAT should you then try more of... what didn't help? And to make matters even more squirrelly than a clear, science-y kind of “the ants in Group A all DIED”, human health is really variable, you're always self-correcting at least a bit, seasons change, conditions get better (and worse) all by themselves, and most health concerns have at least three or more causes.

But NOBODY'S able to do it better for you than you. Medicine is already rife with misinformation and scams, you need accurate data first. Or, you can spend your whole life shuffling things around randomly, applying “magical thinking” - inaccurate, voodoo-like causal chains, exploring the lucky socks hypotheses. And how do you MEASURE progress? Without settling that too, you can also go in circles forever.

...and while I can hold a bar OK, I can only handle it for 30 minutes or so. And any strain causes pain that shoots up my forearm. - Jim SLiff

One thing that helps is to do WHATEVER it takes to make holding the bar easy, makes the picking easier, if the choice is ultimately between playing “wrong” and lazy - or not playing at all - put handles on bars, drill holes through them, loops of strings, rosin, whatEVER. Same goes for picks. It's really quite ridiculous to look through one of those “assisted living” toy catalogs and realize that we should have ALL been using fat rubber-grip pens and giant doorknobs and shelf grabber things and all things ergo- BEFORE we get snorked, instead of waiting till everything's fritzed!

Hemp Oil should be a staple food – one to two tablespoons a day – best taken at the same time as the Turmeric/pepper, as those spices dissolve in the fatty oil in your stomach for an even better effect.

I feel the same way about flaxseed oil & Benadryl, diphenhydra-doodly-doo - whatever is in my world here, two of these a day, every day, as a preventative, seems to work way better than waiting until I feel bad. B vitamins, D, E, C if you need them. By far, most of the medical studies you see saying “this works, this doesn't” are based around the (relatively good) health of affluent late teenies/early 20's in college, and if you have or did have lousy nutrition already YOU WON'T BE STUDIED. Doctors can't ethically design studies forcing people to do stuff they know is bad for them, so we have to master injuring ourselves. Bioflex, capsaicin is PROVEN to not work - on healthy 20-year olds who don't need it, and we eat vitamins BECAUSE we don't eat well, grrr. No Problem! Like: I've lost a bunch of weight the past few years. Getting from 265 to 215, 220 was pretty easy over a couple of years - then I got STUCK for over a year, so I finally got pissed off and “crashed” it away - boy was THAT a bad idea! At the age of 60, with problem homicidal spinal discs, I've now gotta go all tippy-toe trying to get straightened out. It would've been a lot easier to not boof that up in the first place.

DIET!- reduce or avoid sugar, white flour, fried food, salt, dairy, red meat, and processed crap. - Fred Treece

Quite some time ago, I read an interview with skinny hard-rock “shred-bassist” Billy Sheehan. He claimed that a number of aging shredbunnies like himself have been greatly successful at reducing arthritis symptoms, using the same typical low-carbohydrate diet that makes beautiful rollerskating women in bikinis attack you on park benches just like in the YouTube ads - a slice of everyday life, huh. But that low-carb diet is good for just about everything; the thing that finally got me losing weight was the simple question, “How many really fat people over 70 do you know? Umm, umm... just do EVERYTHING right, there's no one secret magic bullet here.

Don't mess around. With some of these conditions, the longer they go untreated, the more permanent damage can be done.

Yup. I even forgive myself for preaching long-windedly, because I KNOW not playing music is awful & I'm not even sure being dead is all that great. Even if just ONE PERSON reads all the posts and gets something, worth the bandwidth methinks. And dying because you EAT TOO MUCH would be really embarrassing, but you're at least saved from that - BECAUSE YOU'RE DEAD.

[Fred Treece]

Low carb diet versus high carb diet...