MY BIG REALIZATION – BIG JOINT DISEASE (AKA. KASHIN-BECK)

I am constantly researching minerals, and I can absolutely say I am a forever student, because even when I am not expecting to learn something new……..I do!  I have found over the past 5 years while I have been researching and digging deeper and deeper into minerals, I have slowly been able to reflect on my childhood and young adulthood to make some pretty revolutionary correlations, if I had only known then what I know now, my life may been different!  Let me expand…..

LET’S LOOK BACK…

When I was about 16 years old, a competitive figure skater, always on the ice, I started to notice that my feet were beginning to change.  I got a large “bump” on the top of my big toe that was quite noticeable and started to bother me.  My mom took me to the doctor and he didn’t think much of it when we went to see him, he said it was a bunion and that one day I might want to get it removed.  He chalked this up to having skates on for multiple hours a day and we all moved on.

Fast forward a few years in my 20s, I had moved to Ottawa and was still skating with a team and my foot got worse and worse.  It wasn’t changing esthetically, however, it was changing because it was becoming more and more immobile and painful.  I went to my doctor to see if I could get a referral for a surgeon about removing the “bunion”.  He was happy to send me to see someone, but when he did I found out that it wasn’t actually a bunion, like everyone had thought, it was advanced arthritis (he compared it to that of what he would have found on a 70-80 year old patient).  I guess what I didn’t understand then was how does a 16 year old have advanced arthritis????  Ultimately, the surgeon couldn’t guarantee that by going in and “cleaning up” the joint that it would make the pain any better; so he suggested that I wear clogs, to keep the joint immobile, so it wouldn’t hurt.  Hmmmmm…….that really didn’t sit all that well with me, I was a runner, very active and was not going to give any of that up to wear “clogs”.  Since, I was already going down the path of alternative medicine and therapies,  I started working with nutrition, enzymes and anti-inflammatory herbs to eventually fix the pain problem, but I was still astonished that no one could tell me the cause.

FAST FORWARD TO TODAY…

As I mentioned, I am always reflecting on my childhood and young adulthood, to see if some of the incidents in my life that are at the forefront of my mind can correlate with the knowledge I have about the minerals in the body.  Thinking more and more about what was happening prior to this particular “bump” showing up on my foot……rewind a few years and when I was a young girl, just becoming a teenager I suffered a tragic loss of my sister.  Now for those of you that know minerals, when someone suffers a traumatic event, calcium rises due to the increased level of sodium (ie: intense stress) and the increased burning of magnesium; which allows this to happen.  I remember talking about this a couple of years ago and sharing with someone that I believed that this tissue calcium elevation may have been the root cause of my foot issue.  Now, interestingly enough I do believe that may have been one piece of the puzzle, but I think I just found another………

So today I was digging deeper into selenium.  Very basically it is a trace mineral that is necessary for thyroid function, it is a key player to support the conversion of T4 to the active hormone T3.  Now something that I didn’t realize, until I was reviewing Dr. Watts published article about selenium [1], was about a disease called Kashin-Beck.  This was found in individuals living in low selenium areas, or eating grains and cereals as major staples of their diet, that contained little to no selenium.  Kashin-Beck disease is classified as an osteoarthritic condition, which affects children in developmental years, otherwise known as “big joint” disease due to the swelling, and calcium disposition, in affected joints.  Now the article goes on to say that selenium deficiency is not the sole cause of the condition, there are other factors as well…..hmmmm…..like elevated tissue calcium from trauma, maybe????

It is astonishing to me that children today might be suffering from something like this, and HTMA can help identify deficiencies and toxicities to enable them to heal and be healthier throughout their entire life.  After decades of research and breakthroughs in mineral balance, the key to underlying health and longevity is knowing and providing your body with exactly what it needs to thrive.

[1] https://www.traceelements.com/Docs/The%20Nutritional%20Relationships%20of%20Selenium.pdf