In the past arthritis was associated with old age in people's minds and there was a tendency to suffer it stoically as inevitable. While the medical profession has intellectually abandoned an assumption that only people in old age are affected, many laymen still assume this is the case. The concept that this is "old age" is pervasive, even creeping into common cultural media as modern as "Star Trek". This is not to indicate that the victims did not often attempt to do something. Arthritis has a long history of quack nostrums and screwball procedures. These quack remedies were assisted by the numerous spontaneous remissions that occur with arthritis or by pain deadening chemicals. It was not necessary to cure everyone, since those who were "cured" were very grateful and those who were not were fatalistic, since their doctors could do nothing either.
It is my contention that arthritis is either a potassium deficiency or is strongly affected by one. I suspect that some poison or some infections or decline in kidney function with age degrades our ability to concentrate potassium and thus makes it impossible to get adequate potassium from food from which almost every processing procedure removes potassium these days. Arthritics characteristically have poor nourishment [Morgan et al] [Stone] including magnesium, which is necessary for potassium absorption [Kremer]. One such poison, which I suspect, is the very poisonous bromine gas, since it probably affected me that way 50 years ago. It is possible that the glucocorticosteroid response modifying peptide hormone (GRMF) to be discussed in the cortisol chapter may be the system involved in the case of infection triggers.
One technique, which seemed to have some success, was the use of spas. At least their popularity would seem to indicate some success. The Dead Sea water has a reputation for healing arthritis and has been successfully investigated with healing lasting up to three months [Sukenik]. It has two and a half to ten times as much potassium chloride by weight as sodium chloride and an even greater ratio of magnesium chloride.That king-sized spa, the ocean, has been given credit for anti-arthritic tendencies also. This is plausible because the ocean contains potassium in about the same concentration as blood fluid. Sea mud is also given credit for curative properties [Veinpalu]. The spa at Bath, England, has potassium content less than one tenth that of ocean water [Riley]. If it is typical of spas, then unless they were drinking the water, it is hard to see how it could have helped.
There have been closer associations with potassium. At one time sulfurated potash was used to combat arthritis [Osol p1092]. It is not surprising that it fell into disfavor associated with such a poisonous anion. An anion is a negatively charged substance which neutralizes the positive charge of an ion like potassium. The first person to definitively link potassium to arthritis in no uncertain terms was DeCoti-Marsh in a book published in England in 1957 [deCoti-Marsh]. He claimed numerous case histories. He recommended a whole pot-pouri of anions to go with the potassium, some of them not nutritional, and some even poisonous. He attributed magical properties to these anions. His approach was reminiscent of the writings of ancient alchemists. More recently potassium supplements in connection with other drugs gave a good response [Casatta].
A more successful technique was the raw vegetable diet described by Holbrook in Europe during the forties [Holbrook]. This diet became quite popular, even though most people must have found it fairly unpalatable. Eppinger hinted that the success of this diet might have been due to its high potassium content [Eppinger]. It might have become more popular if a recommendation to use fried vegetables, soup, or to drink the boil water had been made, which would have permitted the same potassium intake. There have been experiments with vegetarian diets in recent years but they have been changed merely by removing meat from the diet which is probably why only moderate success has been attained. However recently improvement has been noted using a diet that had increased amounts of vegetable juice and unpolished rice [Fujita]. There also has been a study which showed a strong negative correlation with cooked vegetables in Greece [Linos] and in Italy [[LaVecchia]. Dr. Saul has described a case in which vegetable juice and vegetables healed a woman.
That diet is deeply involved in arthritis seems almost certain since when people migrate from areas with very low arthritis rates and start eating processed food, they come down with arthritis.
