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I am in fact rather interested! A few years back, I went through a lot of physical therapy for a shoulder injury, and within a month or two, I had a year and a

I am in fact rather interested! A few years back, I went through a lot of physical therapy for a shoulder injury, and within a month or two, I had a year and a half long bout of IBS and leg cramps. Ultimately I controlled the condition (somewhat) with diet, but I can't help but think the real problem was simply that my pain was the original trigger. Since the problem has only mostly subsided, I'd be thankful for any ideas about just what was going on.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
Cartilage has no blood vessels. It gets all its nutrients from osmosis. Wastes are removed the same way. Osmosis is a less efficient means than direct blood supply, so joints probably tend to accumulate wastes firsts if they aren't all being removed from the body for some reason. Anecdotally, cartilage and nervous system tissues are the last things to heal. Everything else has to improve first. Also, some infections, like strep, are known to settle in the joints. The shoulder is one of the larger joints and has a fair amount of cartilage and similar tissues. So, you injure a major joint and old infection hiding out in the joint gets released into the blood stream. This impacts the entire body. But the gut is where you find 70 to 80 percent of immune cells in the body. My hypothesis is that it is because food is the single largest threat we deal with on a daily basis. So you have what amounts to an internal toxic spill and it stresses the gut because that's the largest concentration of cleanup crews. Dealing with this crisis taxes the entire immune system, but you are most aware of impact on the gut because that's where the vast majority of your immune function is found.
- nicklaf 8y ago
  That's a very interesting theory. I had assumed that the immune-system hadn't been implicated in my case (all the immune-system bloodwork came back normal), but now you have me wondering just a bit, so thanks for sharing.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Your body goes to enormous lengths to normalize your blood because you rapidly die if your blood leaves a fairly narrow pH range. So it will strip your bones of calcium, leaving you with osteoporosis, to keep your blood as close to normal as possible. I am skeptical about the value of blood tests. It seems to me that by the time a blood test shows a problem, things have to be pretty bad. I think reliance on blood tests probably misses a lot. /More speculative postulating
    - nicklaf 8y ago
      Edit: I was almost certainly barking up the wrong tree here: calcium levels have nothing to do with how much your joints pop. :-) Hmm, well that part about calcium is quite interesting, at least in my case. I say this because right around the time I started getting leg cramps, my joints started popping like crazy. My working hypothesis was always that the tight muscles were pulling on the joints, causing them to pop more easily. But maybe now I was actually being slightly deprived of calcium? I say slightly because the calcium blood levels were normal.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

Cartilage has no blood vessels. It gets all its nutrients from osmosis. Wastes are removed the same way. Osmosis is a less efficient means than direct blood supply, so joints probably tend to accumulate wastes firsts if they aren't all being removed from the body for some reason. Anecdotally, cartilage and nervous system tissues are the last things to heal. Everything else has to improve first. Also, some infections, like strep, are known to settle in the joints. The shoulder is one of the larger joints and has a fair amount of cartilage and similar tissues. So, you injure a major joint and old infection hiding out in the joint gets released into the blood stream. This impacts the entire body. But the gut is where you find 70 to 80 percent of immune cells in the body. My hypothesis is that it is because food is the single largest threat we deal with on a daily basis. So you have what amounts to an internal toxic spill and it stresses the gut because that's the largest concentration of cleanup crews. Dealing with this crisis taxes the entire immune system, but you are most aware of impact on the gut because that's where the vast majority of your immune function is found.

nicklaf 8y ago
That's a very interesting theory. I had assumed that the immune-system hadn't been implicated in my case (all the immune-system bloodwork came back normal), but now you have me wondering just a bit, so thanks for sharing.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Your body goes to enormous lengths to normalize your blood because you rapidly die if your blood leaves a fairly narrow pH range. So it will strip your bones of calcium, leaving you with osteoporosis, to keep your blood as close to normal as possible. I am skeptical about the value of blood tests. It seems to me that by the time a blood test shows a problem, things have to be pretty bad. I think reliance on blood tests probably misses a lot. /More speculative postulating
  - nicklaf 8y ago
    Edit: I was almost certainly barking up the wrong tree here: calcium levels have nothing to do with how much your joints pop. :-) Hmm, well that part about calcium is quite interesting, at least in my case. I say this because right around the time I started getting leg cramps, my joints started popping like crazy. My working hypothesis was always that the tight muscles were pulling on the joints, causing them to pop more easily. But maybe now I was actually being slightly deprived of calcium? I say slightly because the calcium blood levels were normal.