Relief from Shoulder Pain: Ron’s Story

• Healthy Gut, Healthy You
• Dr. Ruscio’s Additional Resources

Intro:

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Dr. Ruscio:

Hey everyone, this is Dr. Ruscio. I am here with Ron who has read Healthy Gut, Healthy You, and has seen, thankfully, some nice results and he was kind enough to share his story. So, Ron, I’m really looking forward to hearing more about your journey today.

Ron:

Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of years ago I started experiencing some shoulder pain and some tinnitus in my elbow. I go to the gym, so I figured it’s gotta be a gym injury. Those types of things are very common in a gym, tendonitis or a shoulder injury. So I laid off everything for a while to rest the area and still wasn’t getting better. So I stopped doing certain exercises that would exacerbate my problem. Then I found that there were more and more exercises that were causing me trouble, so I figured it must be something other than my exercise program.

Ron:

It just kind of got worse and worse. So I went to the chiropractor and he’s like, “Oh, you got maybe this problem, maybe that problem” so I went through intensive series of adjustments trying to fix it. He couldn’t fix it so he was like “Hey, you should go to an acupuncture specialist”. So I went to acupuncture specialist, went for a full round and the guy was like “I don’t know what to do, I can’t fix this”. Then I went through “Let’s do massage”. So I did a lot of massage, nothing worked. Then it really started to affect my sleep. It was very painful just to move. It got to the point that if I rolled over it was extraordinarily painful. Then I started feeling it in other parts of my body, like my toes and my fingers which scared me. I started thinking maybe this is arthritis.

Ron:

So I went to the doctor finally, after maybe a year, year and a half because, well, I don’t ever go to the doctor. And he said yes, you have arthritis. My response was, “well, what do I do about it?” He prescribed some NSAIDs and recommended physical therapy.

Dr. Ruscio:

Was this Rheumatoid or was this osteoarthritis?

Ron:

He said it’s not rheumatoid arthritis, which was good. He just said, you’ve got arthritis. I knew that arthritis was an autoimmune condition, so my thought was that I just had to fix my autoimmune system. That’s what I gotta do. I’m not gonna just take NSAIDs for the rest of my life, in fact, they didn’t really help me. Even the physical therapy. Nothing helped me. Absolutely nothing. I knew that your autoimmune has a lot to do with your gut. I had read a lot about that, and already had a pretty good diet. I’d been on a paleo diet for five years. After doing the research, I decided I needed to go on an autoimmune paleo diet. So that’s what I did. I did that for a few months. It didn’t really help me and I wondered how do I fix this? I did a lot of research on the internet and came across your book and read it. And my thought was, wow, this makes a lot of sense. I thought the nice thing about the book was that it was a full protocol. It laid out very specific steps to follow, which I think is great. So I knew my diet was already pretty good. So I skipped that and went right to the probiotics and also the antimicrobial at the same time.

Dr. Ruscio:

So you skipped the dietary phase, but you had already pretty much satisfied those things.

Ron:

Yeh, I had already satisfied that part. I was very aggressive about trying to fix this with my diet initially, it just didn’t work. So I went on the twice a day, probiotic protocol and I went through the two months program of the antimicrobial that you prescribed. After two months I got off that, and stayed on the probiotics. Before all of this, when I got your book, I made an appointment with you, but it was like six months out. So I decided I’ll wait six months for the appointment, but I’m going to go through this protocol. At about probably the fourth month, I started feeling significantly better. By the fifth month basically everything was great. I didn’t even notice the improvement, just little by little, it got better and better then I realized that it was gone. I didn’t even have those issues anymore. So I cancelled my appointment with you.

Dr. Ruscio:

Great. Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s why I wrote the book. Thank you so much for that and really happy to hear that you saw this improvement. It’s quite interesting, two things that really run through my mind as you’re telling your story. One, as we have discussed many times on the podcast, is the gut-joint connection. So obviously you showcase that profile. But there’s this balance we have to strike. We shouldn’t expect things to work in a week, but we also shouldn’t wait over a year. Your case is a little bit of a slower response, showcasing the importance of being patient. I’m wondering, did you notice anything, any early indicators of improvements before your joint pain started to improve around that four month mark? Was there any low level digestive stuff that improved?

Ron:

Yeah, there was a little bit of that digestive stuff that did improve. I went through a stressful event a couple of years ago and I think that was the cause of it. My theory is that it just really wrecked my gut, caused dysbiosis in the gut. I was burping a lot, those kinds of things. I wasn’t bloated, not that type of thing, but after I drank or ate, I would burp. And that went away.

Dr. Ruscio:

And that went away before the four month?

Ron:

Yeah. Everything was very gradual, so gradual I didn’t even realize it. Then one day I just said, I’m not even feeling this pain anymore, at all. It’s just completely gone.

Dr. Ruscio:

That’s how I was when I cleared the parasite that I had many years ago. My main complaints were energy and brain fog and it was a gradual improvement to where I didn’t notice it until maybe second or third month after finishing the treatment. Then I looked back and I said, wow, I never would have had enough energy to do this two months ago. And it kind of hits you like, wow, these things are gone.

Ron:

Exactly. I was sleeping better, just a lot of things improved on a slow basis. But for me, I felt like it was quick, because I was trying to treat it before for over a year.

Dr. Ruscio:

Well I guess four months, relatively speaking, depending on the scale you’re measuring against, isn’t that long.

Ron:

Right.

Dr. Ruscio:

Well, fantastic. I’m glad we had a chance to share this because we haven’t discussed in a while the gut-joint connection. We published a video case study, now it may have been three years ago with Johnny, a young guy who had RA. His RA pretty much went away after going through a course of antimicrobials also after building the foundation with diet and probiotics and then kind of culminating with antimicrobials and he was off his RA medication only after a few months. So there’s definitely this connection between the gut and the joints. You did a phenomenal job. Obviously you went to acupuncture, chiropractic massage, you did paleo. You came in really well educated and having had left very few stones unturned, but this one really important area of that fine tuning of your gut health really moved the needle. This is just fantastic stuff. Is there anything else you want to share with us?

Ron:

I’ve always been aware that the gut was a very important part of your health. Yours was the first information I got that laid everything out in a protocol. So I continued to stay on once a day probiotics. I started with twice a day probiotics, first thing in the morning and when I went to bed. And now I’m on a maintenance program. So everyday I just do a standard probiotic protocol and I’ll just do that probably forever.

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Dr. Ruscio:

And so it sounds like you’ve been decreasing your dose over time and now you’re trying a lower dose.

Ron:

Once I realized that everything was good, at the four or five month mark, then I just went to once a day to see if I could maintain. And I did so I kept it at once a day.

Dr. Ruscio:

Perfect. This is one of the things I tried to write into the book, which was not this dependency upon supplements, but rather let’s hit our peak improvement and then from there try to find the minimal effective dose. So it sounds like I was successful in vectoring that philosophy.

Ron:

I think so.

Dr. Ruscio:

I also want to backpedal to something really quick here regarding the autoimmune paleo diet. Sometimes people think if they have an autoimmune condition, they have to go all the way to the most restrictive iteration of a diet, the autoimmune paleo diet. That doesn’t seem to be the case and why I think that’s important just to reiterate that is because keeping yourself on the autoimmune paleo diet, absent of any symptomatic improvement just makes your life unnecessarily restrictive and difficult.

Ron:

Correct. And I’ve never had a food allergy or anything like that. So I was kind of skeptical, but I was like, well, you never know. And I was willing to try anything.

Dr. Ruscio:

That is why we say in the book, we don’t want to force a dietary solution to a non dietary problem. So you went through the trial, you didn’t see any benefit and then you moved on as the book protocol lays out, to probiotics and eventually to the antimicrobials.

Ron:

Correct. And that was a great thing about the book. It’s just, you know, just laid out step by step, what to try, what to do. It is great information.

Dr. Ruscio:

Thank you, Ron, and great story. Thank you for sharing everything and helping our audience see that there is hope. In your case, I’m sure you were really frustrated at one point after being seen by numerous doctors and trying numerous modalities, but for our audience, you know, don’t give up hope. There is certainly a world of benefit that awaits you as you optimize your gut health. I don’t want to paint that as a panacea, but definitely something that we want to incorporate into the process. Anything else you want to leave people with?

Ron:

Just go through the protocol if you’re having issues and have patience, give it time, and see how it works. It worked really well for me.

Dr. Ruscio:

Awesome. Ron, thank you again so much.

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