Start the Healing Process

Arthritis -Start the Healing Process
By Djehuty Ma'at-Ra

The first Western disease I was ever familiar with as a little boy was arthritis. My beloved paternal grandmother, Bertha Cooper, suffered from this pathology for many years. She had it very bad in her wrists and joints. I remember her asking me if I would go to the corner liquor store on the corner of 101st Street and Avalon Boulevard in Watts, California, and buy her some Ben Gay, a white pharmaceutical anti-inflammatory rubbing cream. She would rub Ben Gay on her wrists and joints and her tendons as well.

As a little boy, I didn’t understand disease. I didn’t know how my grandmother developed arthritis. All I knew is that she had it (and claimed it too).

However, when the Universe bestowed its Akashic Records of health knowledge upon me in the late 1990s, I finally understood why Grandma Sis (Bertha) developed and suffered from arthritis. You see, my grandmother was originally from the South, Mississippi to be exact. The ideal dinner was “soul food.” My grandmother was an excellent cook and I never tasted any food back in my deaf, dumb, and blind days and years that tasted better than my paternal grandmother’s food/cooking.

However, while this so-called food, soul food, tasted good, I now understand that taste is not the criterion or measuring stick for what is healthy or nutritional. It was Grandma’s good tasting soul food that did her in with arthritis and tendonitis. Yes, all that cornbread, collard and mustard greens, salt pork, candied yams, fried chicken, liver, catfish, pork chops, rock Cornish hen, neck bones, ham, white rice, etc. eventually did her (and the rest of my family members) in. Not to mention eating all that white, refined Webber’s and Wonder bread, flap jacks (pancakes), syrup and biscuits, bacon, sausages, jelly cake, jelly sandwiches, saltine crackers, Vienna sausages, potted meat, Spam, hog’s head cheese, liverwurst, etc. And what about all that hot cocoa, coffee (laced with white sugar and dairy cream), butter milk, pet milk, Kool-Aid, and soda pop that she drunk?

She didn’t smoke cigarettes like her five sons, but she would roll up her own smokes with Prince Albert brand tobacco and Zig Zag paper. My childhood friends thought my grandmother smoked marijuana. It was a little embarrassing until they found out what it was she was really smoking.

I mentioned all of the above to let you all know that my grandmother’s arthritis was caused by what she ate and drank on a daily basis through ignorance, tradition, and habit.

All that meat converted into uric acid in my grandmother’s joints and ligaments. The starches broke down into carbonic acid and also made its way into her joints. And so did the lactic acid from the brake down of the dairy products she consumed.

The smoking also created an over acid condition in my grandmother as well. She also had bouts with gout, which is nothing but arthritis in the ankle area.

You see, arthritis is a condition of inflammation of the joints. That’s all it is. The Latin word “Arth” means “joints,” and the English suffix, “it is” means “inflammation.” What is inflammation? A burning! What causes this burning or inflammation? ACID!!! Plain and simple!

Grandma Sis was lucky, eventually dying from degeneracy (that doctors call natural death). However, her sons (and daughter-in-laws, nephews, nieces, and grandchildren) were not so lucky, dying from the insidious cancer, including my father from lung cancer in 1994 and my mother from pancreatic cancer in 1999.