Dr. Brooke Goldner's Goodbye Lupus! Classes

I first heard of Dr. Goldner (Goodbye Lupus) while watching an interview with another WFPB doc, Dr. Joel Kahn. She cured her own lupus and now teaches others how to do what she did. Hint: A ton of green smoothies as well as a raw vegetable diet is involved in the "healing" portion of treatment.

She runs these video classes every few months and always has Q&A periods after each one. That portion of each of these videos runs longer than her class itself, which run about 50 minutes each. The first 2 videos run a bit over 2 hours each, but the third one goes for over 5 hours!

I doubt I would ever follow her hyper-nutrition protocols - I mean, who wants to live on green smoothies, a gallon of water, and raw vegetables every day - but she does give a lot of information, especially on auto-immune diseases.

I don't know how long these videos will be available on YouTube, so grab them while you can.

First class: The Foods Keeping You Sick
Dangers of meat, oil and dairy; basics of auto-immune diseases.



Second class: The Foods You Need to Heal
In this class' Q&A she tells how Dr. Esselstyn and his wife Ann were now drinking green smoothies, at least the day after they spoke with her.



Third class: 6 Steps to Reversing Disease with Supermarket Foods
It may take me a few days to get through this one. She had said there would be a lot of testimonial videos, as well as more details about the food plan and her coaching classes.

 

March Is Auto-Immune Disease Awareness Month

In honor of Auto-Immune Disease Awareness Month I'll once again post the link to the Mixed Connective Tissue Disease Foundation site.

This is the crap disease I have to live with daily. 

I refuse to take the chemotherapy or steroid drugs that are usually handed out like jellybeans by rheumatologists, so I stick to the WFPB no added SOS food plan and eliminate foods that cause me pain, like gluten and (sob) potatoes in all forms. At least I'm not reacting too badly to nightshades right now so I can still have tomatoes a few times a week.

I know eventually, as my disease progresses, I'll have to go on some of those strong medications, chemical concoctions whose side effects are worse than the disease(s) it tries to control, but if doing without my beloved spuds not only lets me sleep at night with a little less pain but keeps me one more day away from that poison, so be it. Once again let me say, maybe Dr. Fuhrman was right.

Staying In with a Chronic Illness Video

This is Why I Take Vitamin D Supplements

A Sunny Day Can Mean All Sorts of Distress

By LAURA NOVAK

SUMMERTIME is not so easy for people living with certain autoimmune diseases. The sun, heat and even air-conditioning can intensify symptoms and cause problems that linger for months, if not years.

For doctors who manage those diseases, primarily lupus, scleroderma and Raynaud's phenomenon, the challenges of educating their patients about sun avoidance become greater, too.

"These are diseases where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," said Dr. M. Kari Connolly, an associate professor of dermatology and medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, whose practice focuses on patients with autoimmune diseases. "A little bit of overexposure to the sun can present a whole lot of problems, and if we can get patients to be compliant with sun avoidance and protection, we can minimize the chances of their getting additional complications of their disease."

Lupus is a chronic inflammatory disease that causes damage to tissue and prolonged episodes of pain. The Lupus Foundation of America says that 500,000 to 1.5 million Americans have received a diagnosis of the systemic form of the disease, known as systemic lupus erythematosus, which affects the skin, joints, tissue, blood and organs. About 25 percent of these patients will also develop skin lesions. Discoid lupus, which affects only the skin, is found in roughly the same number as the systemic kind; 10 percent of these cases, however, progress to the systemic form of the disease.

Lupus is the most common autoimmune disease in which patients are photosensitive, or reactive to both ultraviolet A and B rays from the sun. The foundation says that 75 percent of patients with systemic lupus and 90 percent of discoid lupus patients will suffer flare-ups of symptoms from even brief exposures to sun or heat.

"Photosensitivity can trigger the whole darn disease, including full systemic flare and joint pain and kidney failure," Dr. Connolly said. "The younger patients sometimes say, 'The heck with this, I'm tired of carrying sun block,' and they'll stay out there, and it's not just that they are going to give themselves a bad rash. This is something to take seriously."

The link between the sun and lupus flare-ups is thought to be a set of inflammatory protein molecules called cytokines, which are activated when ultraviolet light hits the skin. The skin inflammation that results can create a chain reaction of other symptoms.

Julianne Lewis, 35, of Santa Rosa, Calif., said she began to show symptoms that were referred to generically as undifferentiated connective tissue disease 13 years ago. When her second son was born four years ago, Ms. Lewis became so sick with stiff, swollen joints, aching skin and lumps on her feet that she couldn't get out of bed. Lupus was confirmed, she said, and since then Ms. Lewis has undergone chemotherapy treatment and taken immunosuppressant drugs to prevent kidney failure. She also takes blood pressure medicine, an antimalarial drug and occasional steroids to keep her symptoms in check.

"I have to avoid the sun because I developed the butterfly rash," Ms. Lewis said, referring to the telltale rash that afflicts 40 percent of lupus patients. "It develops across my nose and cheeks. I get it pretty severely, and mine will go on my chest and arms. I have scars on my arms where the rash blistered so badly my skin was burned."

Ms. Lewis said she had suffered flulike aches and fatigue from even a short time in the sun. She has given up swimming outside with her younger child, she said. Reading a book on the grass is also out of the question. And while Ms. Lewis says she still plays softball occasionally, she wears a hat, long sleeves and wraps a handkerchief around her face.

"It freaks people out because I look so funny trying to cover up," she said. "I have been slow to come around to the hat and sunscreen thing. And I've probably made myself sicker longer because I don't want to accept it."

Doctors say a UVA and UVB sunscreen is just one component of a multiprong approach to limit the extent of her symptoms. Other strategies include sun-protection clothing, applying a sun-protection coating to car windows and staying indoors from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

But for patients with scleroderma and its most common symptom, Raynaud's phenomenon, the solution can sometimes be as painful as the problem.

Scleroderma is a chronic autoimmune disease of the connective tissue that causes the skin to become so thick and leathery from inflammation that hair stops growing and sweat glands strangulate and die. The disease often begins in the fingertips before it works up the arms and throughout the rest of the body. In 90 percent of patients, it is accompanied by Raynaud's phenomenon, where blood vessels become thickened, too, shutting off the flow to the extremities.

The Scleroderma Foundation estimates that of the 300,000 Americans with the disease, nearly a third have the systemic, or diffused, form. The rest have a form limited to a certain place on the body.

That is how the disease began in Dolores McCausland of Cape May, N.J. Two years ago, Mrs. McCausland, 75, had a biopsy taken of a sore on her arm. Doctors confirmed scleroderma as well as pulmonary hypertension, a common result of the disease's affect on the kidneys, she said. She takes a combination of medicines to treat her blood pressure as well as an antihistamine and gabapentin to treat the pain and itching. She is also treated with oral chemotherapy and an immunosuppressant.

Mrs. McCausland said that covering her arms while driving to avoid exposure to sunlight or using her backyard pool was nearly impossible because the sores on her arms make them sensitive to touching.

"If you saw my arms, you would say, 'Oh, my God, there's something wrong with her,' " Mrs. McCausland said. "You know when you put a blood pressure cuff on your arm? My arms look like they have been squeezed, and it's forcing the muscle out to my elbow and shoulder. It's very painful and itchy."

Covering the entire body, even in the heat, is critical for scleroderma patients because they have greater susceptibility to skin cancer. And since the blood vessels can also become sclerotic, or thickened, full coverage helps protect people from the shock of entering an air-conditioned environment.

"The problem is that in the summer these patients go from dramatic warm to cold, and they can become very symptomatic from that," said Dr. Chris T. Derk, an assistant professor of medicine in the rheumatology division at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. "It's exceedingly rare, but we have people with Raynaud's of the heart vessels, and they can go into spasms and give you a small heart attack. You have to cover the whole body because if they can't rewarm the hand, they can break it."

Mrs. McCausland said she coped by keeping her house temperature warm and wearing Isotoner gloves to the grocery store, even during the summer months.

"People think I'm some kind of nut," she said. "I have never been sick a day in my life, and I had to come up with this. "

Webinar - Arthritis

(Forgive the crankiness. I've been sick again since a few days before Christmas and still not feeling any better, then my computer starts acting up and the hard drive needs to be replaced ASAP, and being the holidays, stores are sold out of the drive I needed, and when I found one, it's going to take a few days to get here.)

I expected so much from this webinar and got so little. I really wish there was some way to reel Dr. McDougall in to keep him on topic.

And I don't know what's going on with his health lately, but his skin coloration has gotten pretty awful lately, especially all the brown splotches on his forehead and yellowed cheeks.

Qigong with Lee Holden

I've mentioned this man's qigong videos before, and just found another YouTube channel he has. There you'll find a number of these short workouts, many for pain and stress relief as well as general well-being. A great introduction to the art!

So Sad! Spuds No More!

This is me, after realizing I'm developing an allergy or some other adverse reaction to potatoes:

For the past few months we've been eating the super simple McDougall way. On weekends I would make soup for our dinners; Mondays and Thursdays would be rice and veg meals; Tuesdays and Fridays would be potato meals; and Wednesdays were sweet potato meals.

Once in a while I would cook up one of those mesh bags of tiny Gold potatoes and eat them with a veg and either ketchup, gravy, or a nutritional yeast-based cheese sauce for lunch. I even got my son in the habit of eating these delicious little gems.

But the past few weeks I noticed some weird things happening. While eating those tiny taters, or soon after, my throat would get this strange itchy and swollen feeling and my sinuses would get inflamed, and they would stay like that until I woke up the next morning. 

I was also eating russets at dinners once or twice a week but nothing happened after eating those, so I "knew" it wasn't potatoes themselves in general. Ha!

The first time it happened I assumed it was the sneezing spell I had during lunch and thought nothing of it. The second time there was no sneezing but the same thing happened. The third time I only ate 4 leftover tiny taters and by the third one the throat thing started so I stopped eating them. An allergic reaction to something that was sprayed on them, either in the field or the warehouse or stores? Or something in the potatoes themselves?

Now came the experimentation. I tried russets, whites, red, and yellow/Yukon Golds, in both conventional and organic versions. I also varied where I bought them, in case it was something happening in one store and not the others. At first the russets were fine, but then I started to react to those, too. Same thing was happening no matter which variety of potato I ate or where it came from. In fact, near the end of my trials the feeling was starting after the first few bites. 

What turned out to be my last day of experimentation really worried me. I saved testing the russets for last, because I had previously eaten them with no problems, even while reacting to the Yukon Golds. I guess something inside of me changed, because now I was getting the same reaction - the swollen sinuses, itchy and now swelling throat - after just 2 bites. I immediately spit out what was in my mouth.

For the next hour I hung around the house fully dressed, purse packed, ready to go to the ER if things got worse to get a shot of epinephrine if needed. My husband was ready to call 911 if things progressed too fast. Luckily the swelling started to subside a few hours afterwards and he and I started to relax.

So no more potatoes for me. My son already said he would finish up the few we still have in the house, especially now that he got into the habit.

But I don't dare eat another potato.

Hence the sobbing.

Now I don't know whether I should avoid all nightshades vegetables, too, like peppers and tomatoes. We eat the three of those foods at least daily, many times 2 or 3 times a day. I'd really go crazy if I can no longer have tomatoes, too!

Darn this auto-immune disease! I never know what's going to happen next!

May 10 - Lupus Awareness Day

For more information on this disease, go to the Lupus Foundation of America site.

March is Auto-Immune Disease Awareness Month

What is autoimmune disease? What is connective tissue disease?
March is autoimmune disease awareness month. So what does that mean? Watch my video to find out!
Posted by For Prevention's Sake, Barbara Grubbs, NP on Thursday, March 24, 2016

Webinar - Arthritis Q&A

Once again there were problems during the Q&A. Gustavo's voice kept echoing, then about 45 minutes into the webinar his feed cut out completely and Dr. McDougall was left on his own. At least he picked up the ball and ran with it, answering questions people presented to him in the chat box, until the webinar software rudely cut him off with no warning a few minues later.

Now I see the replay isn't full screen. It also ends when Gustavo's feed ended and does *not* include the 10 minutes Dr. McD continued to talk and answer questions. This isn't the first time Gustavo edited things out that people would have wanted to see. :(

Registration Open for Next 2 Webinars

Thursday, February 18, 2016 at 11:00 AM Pacific Time

Register Now

Title: Arthritis Q&A Session.

Description: In this live webinar, Dr. McDougall answers questions from a live audience and shares his experience with treating arthritis with diet.

Presenter: Dr. John McDougall, MD

Questions: Send questions ahead of time to webinar@drmcdougall.com. Please keep questions related to the topic of the webinar and please keep questions as concise as possible!

Materials: Reading and viewing materials for this webinar

• Video: Inflammatory Arthritis
• Newsletter: May 2014: Ten Cases of Severe, mostly Rheumatoid, Arthritis Cured by the McDougall Diet (opens new window)

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Thursday, February 25, 2016 at 11:00 AM Pacific Time

Register Now

Title: The Fat You Eat, Is The Fat You Wear!

Description: In this live webinar, Dr. McDougall explains in more detail what he means when he says “The fat you eat, is the fat you wear”. Q&A Session to Follow. Materials: Reading and viewing materials for this webinar

Presenter: Dr. John McDougall, MD

Questions: Send questions ahead of time to webinar@drmcdougall.com. Please keep questions related to the topic of the webinar and please keep questions as concise as possible!

Materials: Reading and viewing materials for this webinar

• Videos: John A. McDougall, MD: The Starch Solution & McDougall’s Moments: Obesity
• Newsletter:  March 2009, People Passionate about Starches Are Healthy and Beautiful  (opens new window)

Prevent and Reverse Arthritis Webinar

So much for this being the last Hawaiian trip.