Rheumatoid Arthritis, The Center’s Approach

By Richard Lewis

When I came to The Center, I suffered from arthritis for 25 years. My sister insisted I come since she had such wonderful results with her rheumatoid arthritis. Using The Center’s approach, I can now see the knuckles on my hands, I have no pain, I can walk, and I don’t wear braces in my shoes anymore. It was a miracle for me, too, as well as my sister ,” a woman told a Lunch and Lecture crowd this fall.

” … adverse food reactions can cause symptoms. ”

When asked about The Center’s results with patient/co-learners diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, Dr. Riordan explains that it started with his first patient. In February of 1978, Marge came to The Center for relief of her arthritis pain. It was considered quite a challenge to see someone with rheumatoid arthritis back then. The prevailing wisdom of the time was that a physician could prescribe something to alleviate the pain and ‘teach the patient to live with their disease.

We approached The Center’ s first rheumatoid arthritis patient in much the same way we approach all patients. We wanted to discover the underlying factors that seemed to be triggering her body’s painful response.

In her case, we found adverse food reactions and a high body burden of lead, which is a protoplasmic poison [a poison that works at the level of the basic components of the cells in the body]. Removing her lead burden by intravenous chelation and having her avoid the offending foods, we learned that the symptoms of arthritis, which had been present for months and months, disappeared.

This seemed to indicate that rheumatoid arthritis was not an autoimmune disease as was commonly thought, but a disease whose causes most often went undetected.

Since our first patient, we have come to learn that there are many, many causes for inflamed, swollen joints. These include bacteria, parasites, viruses, adverse food reactions, and excessive heavy metal burdens, just to name the more common ones. This led us to look very carefully and repeatedly for underlying causes in anyone evaluated at The Center with a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis.

Another fascinating thing about our work with rheumatoid arthritis at The Center is to see how much standard medicine has shifted in its awareness in the last few years toward what The Center physicians have known for so long. For instance, until recently the party line of the arthritis establishment was that anyone who suggested food had anything to do with rheumatoid arthritis was a total quack. Now, many commonly understand that adverse food reactions can cause symptoms.

Research supporting a nutritional and biochemical approach to arthritis began coming together about this same time also. Norman F. Childers, Ph.D., a professor of horticulture at Rutgers
University in New Jersey, wrote a book supporting the elimination of the night shade vegetables from the diet to control arthritis. The night shade vegetables include potato, tomato, eggplant, all kinds of peppers except black pepper,and tobacco.

George K. Davis Ph.D., a professor of animal nutrition at the University of Florida at Gainesville, found another correlation between night shade plants and arthritis, this time in animals. Cattle, in one area of Argentina, fed the leaves of night shade plants, often had to eat on their front knees because their necks were too stiff to feed naturally. These cattle had developed lesions of the soft tissues; primarily the elastic fiber had become calcified.

Dr. Davis discovered similar problems with cattle eating leaves from plants of the night shade family in Brazil, Hawaii, Jamaica, and the European Alps. Since that time, there has been other research observing various animals eating foods in their environment which caused various types of arthritis.

The Center has always approached each person who comes in with arthritis, or any disease or diagnosis, from the standpoint that this person is different from all others. By doing this, we look at a person’s individual biochemistry to find out just what underlying factors may be causing the body to have pain and inflammation in the joints rather than try to fit them into a particular protocol that has worked for some.

The Center is often compared to Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective. For those difficult cases Scotland Yard could not solve, they called in Sherlock Holmes to find the significant clues other detectives missed. The Center works much the same way, looking for the clues to unlock the underlying factors of a particular disease process.

This is why the Sherlock Holmes approach evaluates nutritional status, adverse food reactions, and reactions to bacteria, parasites, and viruses, along with stress, to help detect the underlying factors of arthritis.