Reluctance to start DMARDs

Arthuritis

@Caleb1981 Re autoimmune on tissue other than joint surfaces… I know exactly what you mean… or I think I do from my experience…

The enthesis (capsule end) esp on my knees gets very hot, and I get dull aching pain in the bone behind the cartilage surfaces. Also the tendon sheath is attacked, causing it to stick to the tendon moving under it making it painful to move the affected joint if its been still for a while (hours) and repair cells have grown attachments that have to be gently “ripped” away to free the tendon. Also autoimmune attacking ligaments making any load carry or torque movement painful, and the mist scary. attacking muscle, causing the affected muscle to visibly atrophy. You can feel it happening as it is always inflamed before shrinking. My left shoulder is visibly smaller, weaker & bonier than right, and I am left handed!

My own theory on this (yet to be proven) is if its my dominant arm shrinking then its because its cells were most used and repaired in the gym, and my immune sys does not like the proteins it was repaired with. So its attacking any cell displaying the offending animal derived compounds which mimic my own, but not identical.

So I have recently switched to a vegan diet, where these compounds cannot be mistaken as close enough to my own and used without restructuring by my cells, only for my immune sys responding with “impostor!” alarm and attacking. Sialic acid is one such compound in animals that does not exist in plants, so with a vegan diet my cells have to “cook” their own from my own cellular recipe. Hopefully that might work. Time will tell if it makes any difference, and as we are talking about most of my weight bearing joints and muscle, its prob 1-2 years to replace a lot of this poor quality tissue. No more steaks for me. Or bacon😖or 🍔🧀🥩

If nothing else, a vegan diet makes you lose weight really fast and it stays off.