Overview

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease that attacks synovial joints in the body.

Please see conventional, complimentary and alternative medical treatments for important background information regarding the different types of medical treatments discussed on this page. Naturopathic, Complimentary and Alternative treatments that may be considered include:

Treatment

Naturopathic, Complimentary and Alternative Treatments

Immune System Balancing

[McCulley2018, pp 28, 35, 61, 89, 327-338] reports that Rheumatoid arthritis is a TH1-dominant, systemic, autoimmune disorder, and proposes an approach to treating this disease, which should be supervised by a properly trained medical professional. Dr. Weyrich has considerable interest in this topic, but has not treated any cases of rheumatoid arthritis with Immune System Balancing.

Please see What is Immune System Balancing? for more information.

Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN)

According to the Low Dose Naltrexone home page [LDN], LDN has been seen to benefit rheumatoid arthritis, which is considered to be an autoimmune disease. [LDN_Autoimmune] summarizes case reports of ten patients having rheumatoid arthritis being treated with LDN, obtaining remission of joint pain and swelling in all cases.

Dr. Weyrich has been trained in the use of Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN). However, Dr. Weyrich has not treated any cases of rheumatoid arthritis with LDN.

Please see What is Low Dose Naltrexone? for more information.

Corticosteroid and Thyroid

Corticosteroids to suppress inflammation are commonly prescribed. However, most patients with rheumatoid arthritis are hypothyroid and there is considerable medical experience that treatment of hypothyroidism benefits RA. In addition, thyroid supplementation is known to mitigate the side effects of corticosteroid treatment [Barnes_Research_Foundation], [Barnes1976], [Hertoghe1914], [Hertoghe1915], [Starr2005, pg 186].

Neurotransmitter Balancing

Neuro Research [Hinz2015] reports that Abdominal Migraines can be benefited by balancing neurotransmitter levels in the body.

Dr. Weyrich has been trained in neurotransmitter balancing protocols, but has not treated Abdominal Migraines using this technique.

Please see What is Neurotransmitter Balancing? for more information.

Hypotheses

RA (and other autoimmune diseases such as polymyositis and amyloidosis) is associated with hypothyroidism and deposition of mucin in connective tissue [Starr2005, pg 153].

References