At 27 I was diagnosed with Psoriatic Arthritis and was bad enough for me to take Enbrel. C-reactive protein was around 8 and I had pain in my upper back, knuckles on rt hand and wrist, rt knee, rt foot, and was starting to get at my shoulders as well. Enbrel did an excellent job and I was back to 100% in 3 days....I cried when the pain went away.
This worked great for over 3 years and then I started to read about what I was injecting into my body. You hear about cancer and infections etc as it is a blatant warning but in my case I really didn't care as from what was happening to me in regards to pain it was simple to justify the medication. Every box comes with a little square that unfolds into the size of a page of news paper and it has two sides with charts and the lettering is really small so you don't want to read it. I ended up getting sick and got a new shipment of my wonder drug and I opened the package unfolded the paper and started to read........it made me think about the lack of long term studies as in "I am 30....do I take this forever?" and looked into diet.
I went for gluten free as I started to look at gut permeability and would be relativity easy for me to do. Gave up pasta/pizza etc. Carb level was still high as plenty of brown rice, potatoes, and other gluten free starches so still had roasted gralic mashed potatoes. I kept it up till I got a cold and got an excuse to "see if this works" and the pain came back quickly so back to the drawing board.
