How I helped my client with arthritis

My client, let's call them Lucy for the sake of this, came to me with psoriatic arthritis which was getting increasingly worse. She'd tried many medications from her doctors, including steroids and other forms of immunosuppressants, but nothing seemed to be working. Lucy's arthritis had started in her thumb and toe, but by now her shoulder, back and chest were also painful and were beginning to limit her movement.

I started as I always do, by zooming in on the symptoms to understand when they started, what was happening in her life at the time, what makes them better and worse etc. Then I took a step back and looked at the bigger picture to see Lucy as a whole person, rather than just focusing on her arthritis. I took a detailed personal and family medical history, then asked lots of (seemingly random!) questions about each of her body systems - for instance, do you experience bloating, do you feel rested when you wake up, when you get a cut does it heal quickly - and finally we spoke about her diet and lifestyle.

Whilst Lucy was eating lots of fruit and veg and ostensibly 'healthy' food, I identified she was having a lot of inflammatory foods and drinks too, like bacon, crisps and alcohol, with few anti-inflammatory foods, like oily fish, turmeric, ginger and walnuts. I decided to run blood tests to understand the levels of inflammation we were dealing with - pretty high, as it turns out!

With some changes to Lucy's diet, like switching from processed meats like bacon and ham to fresher, less inflammatory options like turkey and pasture-fed meat, and including targeted anti-inflammatory supplements, we managed to massively reduce Lucy's inflammatory markers in 4 months! This meant less pain and more movement.

Scroll down for the deets...

CRP is a general marker of inflammation in the body and it should ideally be below 1. Lucy getting hers from 16 to 3 is massive!

Our omega 6:3 ratio (6 = inflammatory fats, 3 = anti-inflammatory fats) used to be closer to 1:1 when we hunted and gathered our food, but with the increase in grain-fed meat and processed food, the accepted 'good' level is now 4:1. Most people's are more like 10:1. Having such a high ratio initially (29:4) shows how inflammatory Lucy's diet was and getting it down to 14:6 shows how much the changes have helped.

Triglycerides are fats stored in the blood which come from food and also from excess calories. If they're too high they can increase risk of heart disease and they also tend to be a marker for being overweight. The fact that Lucy's levels are now optimal after her changes shows how changes can have such positive impacts on many aspects of our health!

As well as Lucy's inflammatory markers coming down, she found she had more movement in her joints, less pain, fewer signs of inflammation, and she lost weight. Go Lucy!!!

Doing these tests is really useful for both me and my clients as they show me what we need to focus on and they show my clients that their efforts are working! I also think it's super interesting for us to know what's going on inside our bodies, regardless of whether we have any symptoms, as so often we only see this sort of information when we're already unwell, so why not get ahead of things.

Please get in touch if you'd like to do any similar testing so you can learn more about your body!

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