Osteoarthritis and Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN)

Osteoarthritis and Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN): The next question is, "I've been taking Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) 4.5 milligram for osteoarthritis for about five years I'm not sure how much it has helped. Do you have any information on the use of LDN in this condition?" So again, osteoarthritis tends to be an inflammatory response. It might have an autoimmune component, but a lot of times it can be a situation where there's a lot of overuse, and that's where low-dose naltrexone is going to help reduce inflammation. If you don't think it's helped very much, what I wonder, what would happen if you stopped taking the medication ? I think that that could be an abrupt realization of "oh my gosh it's been working great".

So, the other thing that I want to address is that I think it's really important that when people are started on low-dose naltrexone, or even counseled, throughout their time is the expectation of how well LDN is going to work. So low-dose naltrexone isn't necessarily going to take a hundred percent of your pain away immediately, or even within the short term. Right, so most of the time the patient expectation is you get a prescription, you start taking it, it's going to take care of everything 100%, and that's not necessarily always the case, because especially when we're dealing with an osteoarthritis, perhaps there's a food intolerance and if you still keep eating that food, you're going to continue to have that inflammatory response. So are you actually taking two steps forward and one step back every day or every hour, or whatever, it's that there's a lot of other issues that go along with that .

So again it's about working with your medical professionals that really understand low-dose naltrexone, so that we can guide you and help you on that journey. And I will say and I'm sure that Sam and Steven do this as well every day. When we talk to patients who have been taking Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN), whether it's been for two weeks or ten years, things come up, new things come up, new information comes forward, and we're like that would have been fabulous to know way back when, because honestly, time is the one thing you never get back, and so we want you to feel the best that you can be every single day of your life.

And when we get into the weeds, when we really get down to the root issues, why does somebody else all of a sudden have osteoarthritis? Are they gluten intolerant? Is there a food like egg or corn;  perhaps it's dairy;  what else is going on; do they actually have an underlying virus I don't know? But those are some of the tests that we can look at, and we can quantify, we can look at what's growing in the gut perhaps, that's a contributory, because again, LDN doesn't cure anything. It supports the body's natural mechanisms, and that's what to me is the most beautiful part about LDN