Monitoring inflammation can be done effectively for most people via CRP and ESR measurements. These change significantly from day to day, so be mindful not to get tested on a day that is an outlier.
To learn how to reduce CRP and ESR naturally, see https://www.rheumatoidsolutions.com
- Factors that can influence CRP and ESR measurements
- How to get a correct measurement
Today we’re going to talk about monitoring your inflammation levels. If you’ve got rheumatoid arthritis or another form of inflammatory arthritis. So the best markers for inflammatory arthritis are typically C-reactive protein and SED Rate. So C-reactive protein is sort of the medical standard for inflammation, especially with rheumatoid arthritis management. And SED Rate, or ESR as it shows up on your blood results, is an additional marker of inflammation. Both can be used to observe inflammatory markers month to month, for example, and both can be used together to create a combined sense of how your inflammation is tracking.
If we go and get these done on a regular basis, one thing to keep in mind is that they can change a lot on a day-to-day basis. I have seen my C-reactive protein change dramatically over the period of just a few days, depending on some other factors going on in my body. Specifically, sometimes I used to get some tendonitis in one of my knees, completely unrelated to rheumatoid. It was because I had a limp for a while with a bad left knee many years ago. Within the space of only four days, I watched my C-reactive protein drop by more than half by simply addressing the tendonitis in my right knee. And so we really want to take into account on the day that we go and get our blood tested. How do we feel on that day? Because if we’ve got a particularly bad day going on and we go and get our blood taken on that day, this can have quite significant consequences as to our treatment plan if we then go and see our rheumatologist. So if you’re having an off day and your C-reactive protein becomes elevated because of that particular bad day, your rheumatologist can look at you and look at the results of the lab work and say CRP’s up, SED rates up, we need to increase your medications. By contrast, if you cheated and you did a juice fast the day before the blood test, and then you went and your C-reactive protein and your said rate was super low because you’re basically cheating the system. And then the doctor would look at that and say, wow, you’re doing really well. We might not adjust your medications this visit. It is that profound, it is that influential, the results of your blood markers.
So what I recommend is that we get our blood taken and have these inflammatory markers measured on a day that is typical, because if we take it to one of the extremes, like I just said, and cheat our blood markers or show up on a day where we’re really having an off day, there can be long term consequences, particularly with regards to suggestions from the rheumatologist. So if we go on a typical day, that’s a fair representation of how we feel, and therefore in the next rheumatology meeting, you will get a fair assessment of the sort of drugs that you might be suggested. That’s my thoughts on this. If you have inflammatory markers that are consistently elevated, if your C-Reactive protein is above 5 milligram/l or your SED rate is above 20mm/hour, there is so much that you can do to reduce it.
So we’ve been helping people with rheumatoid arthritis for nearly a decade reduce their CRP and SED rate. If you want to learn more how we go about it, head over to RheumatoidSolutions.com. We’ve got a complete course for you or coaching for you. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next video.
