Diana - Healthy Joints for Life: An Orthopedic Surgeons Proven Plan to Reduce Pain and Inflammation, Avoid Surgery and Get Moving Again

For my mom and dad

For my precious Ann, Jack, and Megan

For all my patients, who continue to inspire and educate me

And for all of us who seemingly came from nothing
Who scratched and fought for what we have
And, at some point, realized we came from everything

CONTENTS

Understanding Joint Pain

Inflammation: The Cornerstone of Disease

Joints: How They Work and What Can Go Wrong

Eat: Foods That Reduce Joint Pain

Support: Supplements

Move: How Exercise Helps
You Move Better and Feel Better

The Healthy Joints for Life Program:
Eight Weeks to Reduce Pain and Inflammation

Ready: Before You Begin

Week One

Week Two

Week Three

Week Four

Week Five

Week Six

Week Seven

Week Eight

The Cell Science Behind It All

How the Healthy Joints for Life Lifestyle Works
To Battle Heart Disease and Decrease Cancer Risk

INTRODUCTION

LET ME TELL YOU about my mother. By the time I graduated from medical school, my sixty-two-year-old mother had already suffered through several surgeries for her rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a despicable form of arthritis where the body attacks its own joints as it would invading bacteria. The resulting inflammatory response is incredibly intense. Multiple joints swell, hurt, and degenerate.

Her treatments were torturous. Regular injections of gold and methotrexate gave her nausea and headaches but didnt reduce her pain. Anti-inflammatory medicines gave her an ulcer. Nothing stopped the aggressive progression of her joint pain and joint destruction.

I was a budding doctor, working around the clock to learn all the answers about how to treat and heal medical conditions. Seeing her suffer from the disease was excruciating. Seeing the treatments make her worse was beyond heart-wrenching. I desperately wanted to help, but her aggressive RA wasnt going to wait for me or medical research. Or anything else. After treatments with countless medications failed miserably, she had surgery to reroute and repair ruptured hand tendons. Her left wrist had to be fused. As a result, she fed herself with difficulty and could barely hold a cup of water. Even before the hand surgeries, standing had become so painful that the ends of several eroded bones in both of her feet had to be removed. Like a relentless tide, the disease slowly but persistently ate away at her joints.

By her seventieth birthday her knees were bone on bone and her hips were equally bad. Her inactivity led to other medical problems, like diabetes and heart disease, so she wasnt healthy enough to have replacement surgery, and she could barely walk by the end. Sadly, my most intimate moments with my mom consisted of me draining the fluid from her swollen knees and shoulders. RA deprived my mother of some of the best days of her life, and all I could do was watch in horror. I was a grown man, a surgeon, and an exNFL player, and I cried for my motherand my kids saw me. They saw my mother, they saw my helplessness, and they understood what RA was doing to all of us.

Because of my mother, I came to hate inflammation and joint pain and what they can do to a person. I will never forget what they did to my mother.

***

For four decades Ive been witnessing the devastating effects of inflammation and joint pain both personally and professionally. For years Ive been studying the science behind inflammation and devising ways to defeat it. I now have a battle-tested, scientifically sound game plan to deal with joint pain and inflammation.

As for this book, it will be my job to make the science behind joint pain understandable and interesting. I will spare you most of the gory details but will arm you with enough knowledge so you can better understand what is happening to your joints and how my program will help them. Ill tell you some stories from the NFL, college football, and my medical training and practice. Ill keep it simple and clear. Once you understand my program and put the plan into action, you will start to get your life back. You will start controlling your joint pain, and your joint pain will stop controlling you.

MOM AND DAD, THE SUPER BOWL,
AND LEADERSHIP

Almost every day of my life as an orthopedic surgeon, Im asked what it was like to play in the Super Bowl. It always amazes me how important and alluring that one event is. Many of my patients think its cool that Im the only orthopedic surgeon to have ever played in the Super Bowl, but the Super Bowl has much greater importance to me than that.

The play-offs for the 1982 season were the first time that my parents ever flew on a plane. Those few weeks were some of the most exciting weeks of their lives. They were on TV, were interviewed by reporters, and were treated like royalty all because their son was playing for the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl XVII. They came to practices, took pictures with legendary Dolphin coach Don Shula, and met the guys on the team. They sat on the fifty-yard line. For a short time they were treated like the celebrities that I always thought they were, and that meant more to me than anything.

The thing I remember most about the Super Bowl was a conversation that I had right before the game with the captain of our team, Bob Kuechenberg, or Kooch, as we knew him. Kooch was making the rounds, trying to make sure everybody was ready. He approached me and said, Rookie, youve been doing it all year for us. Now its time to help the other guys do it, too. It was just five seconds of encouragement accompanied by a tap on the back. But it made me think like I hadnt before about my role as a player and a leader. It was time for me to step forward and become a team leader. The Super Bowl was the day when I realized that following was not enough. Though football was the earlier and greater passion in my life, medicine became my ultimate vocation. Helping people would be my lifes mission. Going through medical school, internship, and residency took a long ten years, and as a med student, intern, and resident, I was closely monitored and rigorously tested along the way. In school I wasnt exactly in a position to be a leader. But over the past two decades, Ive helped a lot of people, and with this book I hope to help many more. Of course, Kooch couldnt have known what direction my life would take, but Im convinced that when he spoke to me right before the Super Bowl, his words foreshadowed that my ultimate accomplishment would be leading people with joint pain toward pain relief.

In 2010 the Miami Dolphins invited players from the 1983 and 1985 Super Bowl teams for a reunion. Since my retirement twenty-seven years prior to the reunion, Id been back to Miami only once, for Dan Marinos retirement celebration. On the flight down I thought of all the sweat, pain, and violence we, as players, endured during our quest for the Super Bowl. We learned that success in football comes from dedication, intensity, focus, and passion. It was understood that while we might lose, we would never be outworked. We had an incredible commitment to one another and, of course, to winning. I shuddered as I thought about what we did to our bodies to play the game of footballto win.