Folk Medicine Experiments: #1

Over the past several years I've occasionally had to battle with joint pains in my fingers.  Early arthritis or just the usual impact pains?  In any case, I've always cleared them up with my homemade remedy:

Take 1 dozen absolutely plain generic aspirin (no coloring, no buffering, no nothing), grind them as fine as flour, and dissolve in one ounce of DMSO.  Shake, stir, and filter through a coarse cloth until the fluid is clear.  Paint on the skin over the affected joint, wait until it sinks in and the skin is dry, then massage the skin vigorously to press the solution into the deeper tissues.  Apply twice a day.

This has worked reliably for years, until a couple months ago.  That's when I got pain and weakness in the joints of my right thumb, from wrist to tip.  I painted on my aspirin/DMSO solution as usual, and it stopped the pain and weakness from spreading, but didn't make it vanish as quickly as usual.  I told Rasty about it, and he worried that this was real arthritis;  he knows all too well about arthritis, having been damn-near crippled with it 20 years ago.  From what he could learn from a dozen doctors, what causes it is one's own immune system going crazy and attacking one's own cartilage.

I thought about that, and considered that the immune system doesn't go hog-wild for no reason.  Something has to set it off, and that something can only be some kind of an infection.  So, first solution: kill the infection.  Problem: just what kind of infection is it?  Not bacterial, I guessed, since lots of people with arthritis take antibiotics fairly often, for other ailments, and there's no record of them having any affect on the joint problem.  Not protozoans or parasites, I figured further, since those are quite noticeable in blood tests -- and, again, no correlation has ever shown up.  That leaves viruses and molds.  There are a number of mold-killers on the market, but where is there a broad-spectrum virus-killer?

Well, I know of an herbal mix that has a pretty good track record:

Grind up equal volumes of fresh raw garlic, fresh raw onion, fresh raw cabbage, and cured shredded tobacco.  For internal infections, swallow a teaspoon-full two or three times per day.  In this case, I painted the mixture on my skin, let it dry, then painted over it with DMSO. 

And looking further through folk-medicine accounts, I found something besides DMSO itself that's said to help with arthritis, and that's copper -- pure metallic copper, worn on the bare skin, as in a ring or bracelet.  After trying it, I realized that if you wear metallic copper on the bare skin, sooner or later the skin sweats.  Sweat is acid, and dissolves ions of copper out of the metal and deposits them on the skin -- thus causing the famous blue-green stain.  But not all of that stain stays on the skin;  some of it is absorbed through the pores, and eventually gets into the bloodstream, where the white blood-cells take up those copper ions and mix them into a chemical which kills all kinds of invading microbes -- but especially molds.  This isn't surprising, since molds (yeast, fungi, etc.) use a lot of copper in their metabolism, and therefore can't refuse to take in the stuff, no matter what else it's chemically attached to -- even if that something else is inimical to the mold's health.

At this point I mentioned my problem, and ideas, to my family doctor.  He agreed that mold infections do tend to make the immune system go frantic, and that both DMSO and copper have good track records for treating arthritis.  But he disagreed that the problem was caused by mold infections in the bloodstream, since "If you've got a mold infection in your blood, you're dead."  Hmmm, but how would the mold get to the cartilage in the joints if it didn't travel through the blood?  He also warned me to be wary of using too much aspirin, since it could burn the skin.  Well, of course: aspirin is acetyl-salicylic acid, and acid can certainly burn you if you get too much of it.  And we still hadn't completely ruled out viruses.

So what I settled on was painting the DMSO-and-aspirin on my skin only once a day, painting the herbal mix on my skin and following it with DMSO two or three times a day, and also wearing a copper ring and a copper bracelet on my right hand and painting DMSO on the resulting stain twice a day.

I've been doing that for the past four weeks, and the pain and weakness in the thumb have been slowly but steadily fading in intensity and shrinking in range.  They're not entirely gone yet, but they're retreating.

I think I'm on to something here.  Does anybody else have any similar stories?

--Leslie <;)))><