The forgotten cure
The patient, who we’ll call Alice, was a 78-year-old woman who had enjoyed excellent health until six months earlier when her younger sister had a stroke.
Rather than see her sister cared for by strangers in a hospital, she had decided to nurse her at home, which meant many trips up and down the stairs to her sister’s bedroom on the second floor. Being so busy, she found herself eating a lot of easy-to-prepare carbohydrate foods rather than her usual high-protein diet.
About a month into this routine, Alice first noticed pain and swelling in her joints and began taking 8–10 aspirin tablets a day, which only took the edge off her discomfort. She had always been able to go up and down stairs without difficulty, but now she climbed the stairs gripping the banister with her left hand and pulling herself upward step by step or sometimes crawling, hand-over-hand and foot-over-foot, “like an animal.”
Alice’s sister was improving, and she was back on her lower-carbohydrate diet, yet she still experienced constant severe pain in her neck, low back pain, and painful swelling of the knees, ankles, wrists, hands, elbows and shoulder joints. Her hands, she said, were always numb or “tingling.” They were swollen, and she couldn’t make a fist for the doctor.
She felt stiff every morning for several hours before the aspirin “took hold,” and the stiffness returned in the evening when the medication was of no help. She was not sleeping well because of the pain.
The cold, damp weather made her condition worse, she noticed. Plus, she’d lost 16 pounds in the past three months and felt she was becoming progressively weaker. She almost always felt exhausted.
The doctor examining Alice noticed that her wrists and ankles were hot to the touch. “She seems dull mentally,”he observed
