FGC,

I’m sure you will take a lot of good info from the posters who answered your question. Here are a few things from yours truly:

The tendency of what was posted to a large part was to see the rheumatoid arthritis as a disease and to prescribe a medicine to treat it, even though the suggestions are for natural products and therefore much better than pharmaceuticals. Yes, boron has helped people and has potential as a treatment. However, my feeling is that this will only help if, and for as long as, a person has an actual deficiency of boron. This could actually take some extended period of time to correct, but no one can predict this. Other very useful supplements are:

1. Vitamin C, which every human should take every day of his life. There are several reasons it is useful for RA treatment, at least 3000 mg/day.

2. Omega-3 fish oil, and anti-inflammatory which works on the same enzyme (cyclooxygenase) that NSAIDS work, but without the negative side affects, and many positive ones. Dosage for RA at least 2000 mg/day of total EPA and DHA.

3. Vitamin B3, best taken in the form of niacinamide, although the flush from niacin is often not only tolerated but enjoyed by RA sufferers. Check out the work of Dr. William Kaufman on B3 and arthritis.

4. This by no means exhausts the list of helpful supplements, but these are probably the most important. Other supplements would be dependent on a more thorough analysis of the treated person’s physical state and lifestyle.

This said, in the case of a fairly young person who was diagnosed, and indeed in all cases, the main thing should be dietary changes which could totally change the course of the disease progression and actually cure it, which is something that no pharmaceutical drug is designed to do, and in fact probably will not happen just with supplements. I don’t know how your daughter eats, but RA has been cured by a mostly vegetarian diet featuring occasional juice fasts, sprouts, etc. An excellent source for info on this type of thing is Dr. Andrew Saul’s website http://www.doctoryourself.com/ , which in my opinion is the best health site on the web. Look up arthritis in the left side column.

I don’t know if you see every post on the Tent (I don’t), so please inform me that you have read this.