Kickas.org Forums Treatments, Drugs and Alternatives NSD and diet-related; Advil and Tylenol contains Starch, why worsens!

I'm a family practice physician and new to the disease and forum. I self diagnosed myself 7 days ago after waking up after 3 hours of sleep with excruciating back pain and bilateral rib pain that worsened at night but was better in the day.

I have of a history of hyperthyroidism (type never determined) diagnosed 15 years ago after delivering my second child, so one autoimmune disease already. I also had arthritis of the hand shortly after that, especially worse at the base of the thumbs, so painful I could not pick up my baby, do dishes, or carry grocery inside the house. I had negative bloodwork for any rheumatoid disease and was told to take NSAIDS. Fortunately I looked into alternative medicine and found out I am allergic to nightshade vegetables, i.e. tomatoes, bell peppers, eggplant, etc. With elimination of these foods, I am completely normal, with occasional flareups if I cheat on my diet. Otherwise I would be on Methotrexate and likely disabled by now.

Yes, I am planning on going to the doctor in several weeks, but I am pretty sure I have AS with all the classic symptoms. Initially I took Advil for this first flare up 1 week ago and noticed that my pain continued to progressively worsen after the pain relief effect subsided over the next several days. After reading extensively about AS topics on this forum, I came across some comments about symptoms worsening after taking NSAIDS. Well, I just figured out why. They test positive
for starch, using the iodine test. As does Tylenol, and Arnica tablets. I am sure someone else must have had this suspicion and tested it with iodine but I have not seen it anywhere else. I only just discovered this fact today and was driven to post immediately.

I had stopped Advil, which I was popping like candy, 3 days ago. And switched to only Tylenol, taking five 500 mg tabs 2 days ago. Then I discovered wrappable heating pads to my low back (SI area), and upper back where it aches awful between the shoulder blades during the day relieved the pain, so that I only took 1 Tylenol yesterday. At night, I sleep on my hard Pottery Barn sofa like a baby, completely painfree, no heating pads even needed. Best sofa ever! Never getting rid of it. Today I have been completely medication free, AND completely starch free for the first day after purchasing some iodine and testing everything. Last three days I was, through ignorance, only on a low-starch diet, not NSD.

Today, I am so much better than several days ago. I can function and work - no small feat. I still ache in my low and upper back without the heating pads but that is only for several minutes of the day when I have to temporarily remove it. The improvement in body and spirit is dramatic. Now I don't fear living in constant pain and being crippled. Now I know I can continue working, which I feared I would not be able to. Now I know what foods AND MEDICINES to avoid. With my previous food-avoidance successful treatment for my hand arthritis, I know I will continue to improve, and hopefully, in a month, return to my pre-flareup condition. In other words, I know I will have my life back.

Hope this helps some of you.

thank you for this. I am taking mobic and just saw that it contains "maize starch".

Good Info! Welcome to the forum! This is a great place. Come back often.

Blessings.

WELCOME, Ling:

Glad You found us and doing NSD properly. There may be some bumps in the road and stealthy starches are always lurking in something (even fresh fruit!), so keep testing! For times in flare instead of the drugs, borage seed oil (about 2g effective GLA) can help very much and also I found that several ounces at a time of wheatgrass juice was very useful in breaking a flare.

But far better to know how to avoid these!

HEALTH,
John

PS: Where in CA are You? I ask because some potential for Professor Ebringer to come here in October.

Hello Ling and welcome to Kickas.

Glad you found something that works, hopefully the AS monster stays far away.

What made you look into elimination diets and No Starch Diet?

Thanks for sharing and best to you.

Tim

Thanks for the welcome. The following are tested strongly positive using the iodine test: Levothyroxine, Prednisone (Deltazone), Vit D 5,000 IU sublingual tabs by Superior Source. Vit D tested originally negative, but when I broke the tablet in half, iodine turned it black.

Gentle Iron by Solgar tested weakly positive.

Thanks, John, for the fantastic tip! I will definitely look into borage seed oil and wheatgrass juice.

Hi Tim. How I stumbled onto the NSD diet was just Googling a search on my symptom of back pain that woke u up from sleep and associated bilateral rib pain. It led me to the Spondylitis Association of America message board forum where I read extensively. There were many mentions by different people of how the NSD diet took away their pain.

At that point, I was not looking at all for a natural cure. I simply wanted to know what I had and how I could treat it. But once I found a homeopathic option, I was definitely ready to try it. After all, what do you have to lose? I had already "cured" my hand arthritis by avoiding nightshade veggies, even though a rheumatologist told me that nightshade allergies were a fairy tale as far as she was concerned. If it didn't work, I could always go back to Advil, which I knew would very quickly progress to TNFs.

My approach to treating my own patients, and myself, it to try something and see if it works. If it doesn't work, then stop it and try something else. This last step, I find, is what most people do not do. They just continue doing the same ineffective thing.

I must confess, here and now, that on my second day of realizing that I likely had AS, the pain had escalated so badly after taking Advil, which would relieve it for 6 hours but leave me with even worse pain afterward, that I took some of my husband's 13 year old Prednisone, half of a 10 mg tablet, i.e. 5 mg.

Yes, I know doctors don't recommend it for treatment of AS, likely because long term use will increase likelihood of osteopenia/osteoporosis as well as the other nasty side effects of longterm use. But I intended it strictly short term, just to allow me to function at work over the next few days and douse the inflammation, which it did very nicely, despite it's very old and outdated age, for 25 hours. But then the pain and inflammation returned even worse, like the Advil.

After I found out these meds have starch! in them 3 days ago, I cold-turkeyed all meds with some de-escalation in pain. I would wake up feeling great. (By the way, the couch alone was only good for 1 night, then I started waking up with slight achiness. After I added a layer of $4 twin-size memory foam to the couch, I slept every night in heaven. It gave me the needed warmth--heat is very effective for me--which the hard sofa alone lacked, and a slight cushion.)

But as I was saying, I woke up feeling great, then would worsen after I started eating. I had thought I was on a NSD diet, but paranoia struck me and I tested the crunchy melon I had just eaten at 9 am yesterday. And it tested trace positive for starch! Melons were supposed to be safe, per comments I had read.

I had resisted fasting because I hate feeling hungry. But after that I just limited myself to the beef my husband had cooked with only salt.

Severely limiting my diet to one food item worked. I was completely pain free by 5pm, 8 hours after eating some starch. Free of pain for the first time in 12 pain-wracked crippling days!

Let me tell you: The absence of pain is a wonderful thing!! As does knowing I can lick this thing by controlling what I eat.

Am going to slowly and carefully introduce new foods into my diet over the next month, but for the next couple of days, it looks like an all-meat Caveman type of diet

Hi, Ling:

It is helpful to understand that, just because something tests positive for starch does not mean it will cause trouble: I think garlic powder tests positive, but Klebsiella do not like garlic; it might--like antibiotics--kill Klebsiella. So, especially in antibiotics specifically, do not worry about the starch fillers.

Also, some things indicate starch at first, but later turn negative; I give it four minutes for sampling foods and medicines.

HEALTH,
John

John, you're right. I think of it as a threshold type of thing. With the nightshade vegetables like tomato, initially I could not tolerate any exposure without it triggering immediate arthritis in my hands. But after a year, after I totally cleared my system, I could cheat a little sometimes, like eat a small bit of pizza crust with as much, but not all, of the tomato paste scraped away, and only experience mild one-day weakening of the thumb joint without any arthritis. If I cheated too much, though, my arthritis flared up again.

I am hoping it is the same thing for starches. That in 6 months I can take foods with some trace starch that I cannot tolerate right now, like blueberry.

Good advice on giving it 4 minutes. The blueberries initially tested negative, but after I reacted to it with low-grade upper and lower backache, I retested it and found that it came out very weakly trace positive, but only after waiting for several minutes.

Right now the gold standard of if I am allergic to something or not is the "Eat one food item at a time and wait 3 hours" test. I'm finding that if I'm allergic to something, I start to ache very quickly in less than an hour; but it resolves after 3 hours and I am back to my pain free state again.