 Hey everyone, this is Dr. Ruscio. I am here with Ron, who has read Healthy Good Healthy You and seen, thankfully, some nice results. And he was kind enough to share his story. So Ron, I'm really looking forward to hearing more about your journey today. Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of years ago, I started experiencing some shoulder pain and some tinnitus on my elbow. And I figured, well, it's got to be, I go to the gym, so I figured it out. It's got to be a gym injury, because those types of things are very common in a gym, that you get a tinnitus or a shoulder injury. I laid off everything for a while just to rest everything, and still wasn't getting better. So I stopped doing certain exercises that would exacerbate my problem. And then I started finding out, well, there's more and more exercises that were causing me trouble. So I thought, I'll do something other than my exercise program. And so I ended up, it just kind of got worse and worse. And so I ended up, well, I got to fix this. So I went to the chiropractor, and he's like, oh, you got maybe had this problem now, problems. I went through an intensive series of adjustments to try to fix it. He couldn't fix it. So he's like, hey, you should go to an acupuncture specialist. So I went to acupuncture specialist and went for a full round. And the guy's like, I don't know what to do. I can't fix this. And then I went through, OK, let's do massage. So I did a lot of massage. Nothing worked. And then it really started to affect my sleep. It was very painful just to move. I got to that point, if I rolled over, it was extraordinarily painful. And I was like, I have to fix this. And so I decided, I'll go, kind of seems like maybe it's arthritis, because I started feeling other parts of my body now, not just my shoulder or my elbow. I started feeling my toes and my fingers. Then I got kind of scared, like maybe this is arthritis. So I went to the doctor, finally, after a year, year and a half. And because I don't ever go to the doctor. And he diagnosed me. He said, yeah, in fact, you do have arthritis. And so I was like, well, what do I do about it? And he's like, well, here's some NSAIDs and get some physical therapy. And was this rheumatoid or was it was an osteo? No, he said it's not rheumatoid arthritis, which was good. He just said, you just have arthritis. And I knew that arthritis was an autoimmune condition. And so I was like, well, I just have to fix my autoimmune. That's what I've got to do. I'm not going to just take NSAIDs for the rest of my life. In fact, they didn't really help me, even physical therapy. Nothing helped me, absolutely nothing. And so I knew that your autoimmune has a lot to do with your gut. I had read a lot about it. And I already had a pretty good diet. I'd been on a paleo diet for five years. And so I really researched it and set up. I got to go on an autoimmune diet, paleo diet. So that's what I did. I did that for a few months. Did it really help me? And I'm like, wow, how do I fix this? And so I did a lot of research on the internet, came across your book, and I read it. And I'm like, wow, this is the first. It made a lot of sense to me. And I thought the nice thing about the book was it was a full protocol. Here's what you do through these particular steps. That was, I thought, this is great. So I knew my diet was already pretty good. So I skipped that. And I was so desperate to fix this. I just went right to the probiotics and also the antimicrobial at the same time. Sure. So you skipped the dietary phase, but you had already pretty much satisfied a lot of the diet. I had satisfied that, yeah. I was very aggressive about trying to fix this with my diet. And it just didn't work. And so I went on the twice a day probiotic protocol. And I went through the two-month program of the antimicrobial that you prescribed. And after two months, I got off that state on the probiotics. And little by little, before all this, when I got your book, I made an appointment with you. But it was like six months out. OK, I'll wait six months, but I'm going to go through this protocol. Well, at about probably the fourth month, I started feeling significantly better. By the fifth month, basically everything was great. And I didn't even realize. It was just little by little. It got better and better. And I realized, God, this is gone. I didn't have it anymore. So I can't spend my appointment with you. It's like, I don't even need it because I can't. Great. Yeah, I mean, that's why I wrote the book. I mean, thank you so much for that and really happy to hear that you saw this improvement. And it's quite interesting. Two things that really run through my mind as you're telling your story. One, as we discussed many a time on the podcast, is the gut joint connection. So obviously, you showcase that profile. But also that there is this balance between we shouldn't expect things to work in a week, but we also shouldn't wait over a year. And your case is a little bit of a slower response, kind of showcasing the importance of being patient. I'm wondering, did you notice anything, any early indicators of improvements before your joint pains started to improve it around that four-ish month mark? Was there any low level digestive stuff that improved? Or were you totally aced? Yeah, there was a little bit of that digestive stuff that did improve. I had been feeling, you know what? What I really kind of felt was I went through a stressful event a couple of years ago, and I think that was the cause of it. My theory is that it just really wrecked my gut, caused dysbiosis in the gut. And I did was burping a lot, kind of feeling those kinds. I wasn't bloated, not the type of thing, but I did after I drank or ate, I would kind of burp. And that did go away. And that went away before the four-month-ish mark, yeah. Yeah, that did go away, yeah. Everything was very gradual, just on a down slope. It was so gradual, I didn't even realize it. Eventually I just said, hey, I'm not even feeling this pain anymore at all, and it's just completely gone. That's how I was when I cleared the parasite I had many a year ago. Some of my main complaints were energy and brain fog, and it was a gradual improvement to where I didn't notice it until maybe second or third month after finishing the treatment, and then I looked back and I said, wow, I never would have had enough energy to do this two months ago, and it kind of hit you. Like, wow, these things are gone. Right, exactly. Yeah, sleeping better, you know. I think a lot of things just improve on a slow basis, but for me it was quick because I had gone through quite a while of this pain. So, yeah. Right, over a year prior, yeah. So I guess four months relatively, I guess it's depending on the scale you're measuring against. Right. Well, fantastic. I'm glad we had a chance to share this because we haven't discussed in a while the gut joint connection. We published a video case study now, maybe three years ago with Johnny, and he was a young guy who had RA, and his RA pretty much went away after going through a course of anthalicrobials. Also, after building the foundation with diet and probiotics and then kind of culminating with anthalicrobials, and he was off his RA medication only after a few months. So there's definitely this connection between the gut and the joints, and you did a phenomenal job. Obviously, you went to acupuncture, chiropractic massage, you did paleo all the way through AIPC. You came in really well educated and having had left very few stones unturned, but this one really important area of that fine tuning of your gut health can really move the needle. So just, I mean, fantastic stuff. Is there anything else you wanna share with you? Well, I mean, I've always been aware that the gut was a very important part of your health, but yours was the first information I got that said, that kind of laid everything out in a protocol. So I continued to stay on once a day. I was doing twice a day probiotics, morning, first thing in the morning, and when I went to bed. And now I just, I'm on a maintenance program. So just every day I just do standard probiotic protocol, and I'll just do that probably forever. Perfect, perfect. And so it sounds like you've been decreasing your dose over time and now you're trying a lower dose. Yeah, once I realized that, hey, everything's good at the four or five month market, then I just started to, let's go to once a day to see if I continue, and I continued on. Then I just do it once a day. Perfect, so this is one of the things I tried to write into the book, which was not this dependency upon supplements, but rather let's hit our peak improvement and then from there try to find the minimal effective dose. So it sounds like I was successful in vectoring that philosophy. I think so, yeah. Good, and then I also want to backpedal to something just really quick here regarding the autoimmune paleo diet. Sometimes people think if they have an autoimmune condition, they have to go all the way to the most restrictive iteration of the diet, the autoimmune paleo diet. And that doesn't seem to be the case and why I think that's important just to reiterate that is because you having to be or you keeping yourself on the autoimmune paleo diet absent of any symptomatic improvement just makes your life unnecessarily restrictive and difficult. Correct, and I had never experienced, I never had a food allergy or anything like that. So I was like kind of skeptical, but I was like, well, you never know, so I'm just gonna strictly try it again. I was willing to try anything. Yep, yep, yeah, and this is why we say in the book we don't want to force a dietary solution to a non dietary problem. So you went through the trial, you didn't see any benefit and then you moved on as the book protocol lays out to these escalation of steps to the probiotics and eventually to the end for the microbes. Correct, and that was a great thing about the book is just laid out step by step, what to try, what to do, so. Awesome, great information. Well, thank you, Ron, and Ron, great story. Again, thank you for sharing everything and again, helping our audience see that there is hope and in your case, I'm sure you were really frustrated at one point after being seen by numerous doctors and trying these various modalities, but for our audience, don't give up hope. There is certainly a world of benefit that awaits you as you optimize your gut health. Again, not to paint that as a panacea, but definitely something that we want to incorporate into the process. Absolutely, yeah. And anything you want to leave people with it. Just go through the protocol after having issues and have patience and give it time and see how it works, it worked really well for me. Awesome, awesome, well, Ron, thank you guys so much. Great, thank you.