Tests may reveal environmental factor

Dear Dr. Gott: My wife and I, ages 65 and 69 respectively, were recently diagnosed as having severe rheumatoid arthritis. Strangely, without warning, we were hit with the disease within about two months of each other. Isn’t this occurrence rather unusual? Should this have come on like gangbusters overnight, affecting our knees, hips, shoulders and hands? Further, are we stuck with this crippling pain for the rest of our lives?

Dear Reader: Rheumatoid arthritis is not contagious. No one knows what causes it, but it appears to be an autoimmune disease (in which people become allergic to their own normal body tissues).

The fact that you and your wife developed an identical disease within two months of each other is not only unusual, it suggests the intriguing possibility that some common factor in your environment may be to blame.

If I were your doctor, I’d smell a medical report, ready to be written, that would make my name a household word. He should meticulously analyze your diets, habits, living quarters – in short, he should learn everything about you, the purpose being to discover any possible cause for your rheumatoid arthritis.

Also, he should perform blood tests to check you for rheumatoid arthritis look-alike diseases, including Lyme disease, lupus and polyarteritis.

Rheumatoid arthritis usually causes joint swelling and pains that are more or less permanent. These symptoms are often relieved by anti-inflammatory drugs such as Naprosyn, Voltaren, Motrin and others. Sometimes patients must take injections of gold, use steroids or be given prescriptions for anti-metabolic compounds such as methotrexate.

Because of the strange pattern of your disease, you may choose to obtain a second opinion from a rheumatologist, a specialist in various arthritic afflictions.

To give you more information about arthritis, I am sending you a copy of my Health Report “Understanding Osteoarthritis.” Other readers who would like a copy should send a long, self-addressed, stamped envelope $2 to Newsletter, P.O. Box 167, Wickliffe, OH 44092. Be sure to mention the title.

Dear Dr. Gott: My daughter, age 6, suffered from repeated strep throats during the winter until a friend suggested that the child’s toothbrush could be to blame. Perhaps the brush contained remnants of strep that kept infecting the child.

We changed toothbrushes. No strep in more than six years. (She uses a new brush every year.)

Dear Reader: In the presence of repeated childhood strep infections, most doctors point fingers at siblings, day school, grammar school and other possible sources of strep. The toothbrush indictment is intriguing. Thanks for writing.