April 27th, 2010 by admin

It’s a sad fact of modern life that rheumatism in all its many forms is increasingly common. As an inflammatory disease, it’s most likely to affect the joints and connective tissue, and it resists most forms of treatment, i.e. it slowly reduces mobility and causes chronic pain. In some forms such as Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), the damage goes beyond the joints with organs affected as well. It’s estimated that RA affects about 1% of the world’s population and it most often appears between the ages of 40 and 50. You will understand that 1% is about 670 million people and then you reduce that number to favor older people. Under normal circumstances, we would just tolerate the loss of mobility but there is a more serious problem. RA accelerates the onset of artherosclerosis, and there is very clear evidence to show a significant increase in the rate of people affected by strokes and heart attacks. Even with the full range of modern medicine brought to bear, RA reduces life expectancy. Worse, in its earliest phase, it is most likely to cause erectile dysfunction. With the damage to the arteries apparent in the smaller vessels first, the failure to produce an erection often demonstrates the presence of artherosclerosis. Read the rest of this entry »