Love drove Virgil Stenberg of Apache Junction to find a way to ease arthritis pain. “Seeing my lovely, caring wife hurting every night, her hands red and swollen, was very motivating,” said the retired University of North Dakota chemistry professor. “When I promised my wife I would research arthritis, it was a pledge I took as seriously as my wedding vow.”
Despite her husband’s promise, Helen Stenberg didn’t hold out much hope.
“I felt his research was more to improve my mental well-being than anything else,” said Helen, who was diagnosed in 1971 at age 37 with rheumatoid arthritis, but who has battled arthritis pain in her hands since she was 18.
“As the days turned into weeks, weeks into months and months into years, it was difficult to place much hope that my husband would add anything to the arthritis picture,” she said. “My hope was that a new magic medicine would be discovered somewhere that would make my pain disappear.”
What her husband discovered after 12 years of intense research has not only helped her, but more than 3,000 people. Stenberg developed an arthritis treatment called Microdose Therapy that he is struggling to get the mainstream medical community to embrace, even as university studies prove that it’s the most successful and cost-effective treatment available
Stenberg’s possible breakthrough has come at the right time. About 43 million Americans suffer from arthritis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By 2020, when all baby boomers will be older than 55, the CDC expects 60 million Americans will report some arthritis. About 11.6 million of them will have enough pain and stiffness to keep them from doing things they used to do.
“We took Helen to the best experts we could find, watched them work and were confident they were applying the best technologies available,” Stenberg said. “When the results were less than satisfactory, I started looking at nontraditional approaches – magnets, bee stings, uranium mines – with an unbiased mind.”
Stenberg was concerned about approaches that were costly and unproven or dangerous such as uranium. He was more comfortable with harmless methods such as magnets.
“At least it would give people in pain hope that it might work,” he said. “Hope is nearly absent in people who are aching tremendously. Lack of hope leads to desperation. So anything that gives them a glimmer of hope that they can wake up the next day without pain, I’m excited about.”
But what really got Stenberg excited was a breakthrough that came in 1983. In studying how the body reacts to inflammation by releasing natural cortisone, Stenberg found that people with arthritis are unable to produce the extra cortisone needed to fight the pain.
"When arthritis threatens to multiply in the body, the body gives itself an automatic internal cortisone injection,” Stenberg said. “When that system weakens, mild arthritis develops. When it quits, arthritis packs its bag and moves in. I thought there must be a way to use medication in the same way the body uses cortisone naturally, and that’s by using it only when needed, to do manually what the body once did naturally.
The Breakthrough
When he first started his research at the University of North Dakota, Stenberg and his colleagues focused their attention on developing new ways to control arthritis. “We generated a number of hypotheses, or scientific guesses about what would work,” Stenberg said. “We synthesized new chemicals that we hoped would control arthritis, based on the database of what others were working on or had worked on previously. We tested the chemicals on animals. But despite our best efforts, their effectiveness didn’t exceed those on market.” Stenberg then turned his attention to cortisone, the miracle drug of the 1950’s that won the Nobel Prize in medicine for its arthritis control. But by the 1970’s, cortisone’s reputation was soiled by reported side effects of long-term use – increased bone deterioration, high blood pressure and weight gain.
The adrenal glands, located above each kidney, produce cortisone, which helps the body respond to stress; regulates the metabolism of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats; stimulates the liver to raise blood-sugar levels; and stems the body’s inflammatory response.
“If the body stopped producing cortisone, you would get Addison’s disease and die,” Stenberg said. “Cortisone is essential for life, is made by the body, for the body, without which we can’t live. Yet it was beaten up and trampled up and deemed improper to use for medicine. The question I had was how come the Creator put it in our bodies if it didn’t help us? It was a conflict I couldn’t resolve.
Stenberg resolved that conflict when his research led to the cortisone pulse discovery.
“The answer was relatively simple,” he said. “It isn’t daily production of cortisone that is faulty; the body also makes cortisone on demand for other purposes. The body gives itself an injection of cortisone when needed; much like a physician gives an injection to control pain or other problems. The body’s injection is silent, rapidly appearing and rapidly disappearing. That’s why my colleagues missed it.”
Stenberg’s theory was proven when researchers injected a chemical into the paw of a rat to cause inflammation. They then monitored the amount of cortisone in the rat’s blood. The concentration of cortisone increased by 12 times after 5 hours.
“In humans, when arthritis threatens, the body gives itself an injection and prevents the threat from becoming real,” Stenberg said.
When the body loses its ability to produce the cortisone pulse naturally, though, it needs a little help, he said.
“Cortisone can completely control arthritis, but can cause side effects if used improperly,” Stenberg said. “The key is to replicate the body’s mechanism. The body doesn’t give itself a cortisone injection daily, only when it is needed. Daily use isn’t natural, so that’s why side effects develop.”
With daily cortisone use, natural production wanes. As the natural production decreases, people with arthritis need more cortisone to control their pain. Knowing that high, daily doses have side effects, physicians usually wean patients off cortisone when they request more.
“My candidate for the greatest mistake in medicine is the decision made in the 1950’s to use cortisone daily,” Stenberg said. “When physicians used sufficiently high daily dosages to get the disease under control, side effects appeared. When they lowered the daily dosage to where the side effects disappeared, the disease reappeared.
In clinical trials Stenberg conducted, participants’ symptoms were first brought under control. Then, the patients were taught to make replacement pulses – in the form of a pill – when arthritis threatened and not at other times. The participants averaged 75 percent relief on cortisone and little on placebo. No side effects were observed. The results were independently duplicated and verified at the University of Alexandria School of Medicine in Egypt.
“We found that with controlled dosages of cortisone, based upon a person’s age, weight and sex, and by teaching self-administration of cortisone under physician supervision, we could virtually eliminate pain, swelling, tiredness and morning stiffness in five of six people within three weeks of treatment,” Stenberg said. “And the exciting thing is, we could do it for under $100 a year.”
The Effectiveness
Using the data he gathered during more than 20 years of research and clinical trials, Stenberg developed a protocol for arthritis treatment called Microdose Therapy. It is a physician-supervised, two-prescription treatment that is customized based on the disease, severity and medication history. Each client goes through a six-month education that includes patient control of cortisone, food allergy identification and control, antibiotics and a daily pain diary.
“Each patient rates the pain in each area on a scale of 0 to 10 – 0 is no pain and 10 is as bad as it gets,” Stenberg said “Simultaneously, the patient enters the amount of cortisone used that date. Our computer creates a graphic that charts progress, determines patient compliance, and recommendations for better symptom control and communication with the attending physician.”
Stenberg’s research has given hope to people such as Renita Rosenberg of Phoenix, who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia 20 years ago. To ease her pain, Rosenberg tried acupuncture, chiropractic, physical therapy, trigger-point injections, steroid injections and epidurals. She also took anti-inflammatory drugs, anti-depressants, muscle relaxers, pain pills and Lidocaine. But her pain kept getting worse.
“It got so bad,” she said, “I couldn’t function.”
She had to take a leave of absence from her job in educational software sales, a financial hardship for the single mother who is supporting a daughter in college. Her primary care physician, Dr. Klee Bethel, an anesthesiologist at Valley Lutheran Hospital in Mesa, learned about Microdose Therapy and referred her in July. Two months later, Rosenberg was back to work.
“My pain decreased 80 percent,” she said. “I was able to cut back on other medications by 75 percent, so I am in a much better mental state and my energy level is better. Now I can think. Before I couldn’t.”
Pain flares occur, Stenberg said, only when patients eat a food they are allergic to, break their routine or encounter a stressful situation.
“My arthritis pain had gotten so bad that I had to take 50 milligrams of morphine every day and pain pills on top of that,” said 87-year-old Raymond Heinhold of Mesa. “The pain was unbearable. When I started on Microdose in January, my pain level was over 200. Within three weeks it was down to 41. After three more weeks, the pain was completely gone.” Heinhold avoids the foods Stenberg identified as ones that can cause the pain to spike. “If I eat bread or anything made with white flour, I get the arthritis back,” he said. “I can have chicken and pork as long as it’s not fried. It has to be baked or done on the rotisserie. I can go a long time without any medication or pain as long as I stick with the diet.” As for the horror stories about cortisone, those on Stenberg’s protocol said they haven’t experienced any problems. “They scare people about the side effects of cortisone,” Rosenberg said. “But I’ll tell you I have had no side effects under the Microdoses I take. But I did have side effects from all the other drugs I took before."
Spreading the Word
Patient diaries reveal that more than 80 percent of the 3,000-plus people who have used Microdose Therapy have had their pain, swelling, tiredness and morning stiffness reduced within days – using medicine that costs less than $100 a year. According to an article in Newsweek, Americans spend more than $6.6 million yearly on arthritis drugs such as Vioxx and Celebrex (25 percent effective), Methotrexate (39 percent effective) and Enbrel (51 percent effective). Microdose outperforms all of them in effectiveness, the University of Alexandria study showed.
“The problem we have is that primary care physicians are crunched for time,” Stenberg said. “They have to pay for their building, for their support staff, for the utilities. The only way they can do that is with volume. They don’t have the time to look through a patient’s pain diary and analyze why their pain spiked.”
Some doctors, such as James A. Martin, former chief of staff at Mesa General Hospital, and Connecticut resident John B. Irwin, author of “Arthritis Begone,” have embraced Microdose Therapy. Both have treated more than 200 patients using Stenberg’s protocol.
In Dallas, Dr. Robert J. Koval has used Stenberg’s development to treat arthritic patients for two years. “The system gives control to the patient in treating their disease, which they like,” he said. “It actually gives them a numerical value as to when to treat and how much to dose. It takes a lot of guesswork out of the treatment plan and allows the patient to initiate treatment quickly with lower doses. This, in turn, reduces the severity of the arthritic flares because they can be nipped in the bud.”
Stenberg hopes others in the mainstream medical community will accept and use his findings.
“There isn’t a physician in the world who doesn’t want his patient to do well,” Stenberg said. “It’s not a deliberate decision on their part to keep people in pain. They aren’t rejecting Microdose because it’s bad. We’re just going to have to fight our way in just like anything else. I just wish I didn’t feel obligated to keep up the battle.”
Besides the promise he made to his wife 30 years ago to help relieve her pain, Stenberg has carried a heavy financial burden trying to help others. During the last three decades, Stenberg has spent $2 million on research and development.
“It’s a financial nightmare,” said Stenberg, who still subsidizes the development of the treatment and said he lost $68,000 in 2000. “But these people are really hurting, and we can pull them out of the pain. To see them be able to start living again is my reward.”
But his biggest reward? “I got a wife back,” he said. Helen Stenberg has been virtually pain-free since 1984, the year after her husband discovered the cortisone pulse the body produces. “You can’t put a price on creating a way to get people out of their prison of pain,” Virgil Stenberg said. “I rather suspect that I’ll be lost in the dust in terms of credit when all is said and done. And do I care? No….I just don’t want people sitting around in pain when this works. I want to help people like Helen out of their misery. I want to see them free of pain. It isn’t about riches. It’s about giving people their lives back."
Despite her husband’s promise, Helen Stenberg didn’t hold out much hope.
“I felt his research was more to improve my mental well-being than anything else,” said Helen, who was diagnosed in 1971 at age 37 with rheumatoid arthritis, but who has battled arthritis pain in her hands since she was 18.
“As the days turned into weeks, weeks into months and months into years, it was difficult to place much hope that my husband would add anything to the arthritis picture,” she said. “My hope was that a new magic medicine would be discovered somewhere that would make my pain disappear.”
What her husband discovered after 12 years of intense research has not only helped her, but more than 3,000 people. Stenberg developed an arthritis treatment called Microdose Therapy that he is struggling to get the mainstream medical community to embrace, even as university studies prove that it’s the most successful and cost-effective treatment available
Stenberg’s possible breakthrough has come at the right time. About 43 million Americans suffer from arthritis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By 2020, when all baby boomers will be older than 55, the CDC expects 60 million Americans will report some arthritis. About 11.6 million of them will have enough pain and stiffness to keep them from doing things they used to do.
“We took Helen to the best experts we could find, watched them work and were confident they were applying the best technologies available,” Stenberg said. “When the results were less than satisfactory, I started looking at nontraditional approaches – magnets, bee stings, uranium mines – with an unbiased mind.”
Stenberg was concerned about approaches that were costly and unproven or dangerous such as uranium. He was more comfortable with harmless methods such as magnets.
“At least it would give people in pain hope that it might work,” he said. “Hope is nearly absent in people who are aching tremendously. Lack of hope leads to desperation. So anything that gives them a glimmer of hope that they can wake up the next day without pain, I’m excited about.”
But what really got Stenberg excited was a breakthrough that came in 1983. In studying how the body reacts to inflammation by releasing natural cortisone, Stenberg found that people with arthritis are unable to produce the extra cortisone needed to fight the pain.
"When arthritis threatens to multiply in the body, the body gives itself an automatic internal cortisone injection,” Stenberg said. “When that system weakens, mild arthritis develops. When it quits, arthritis packs its bag and moves in. I thought there must be a way to use medication in the same way the body uses cortisone naturally, and that’s by using it only when needed, to do manually what the body once did naturally.
The Breakthrough
When he first started his research at the University of North Dakota, Stenberg and his colleagues focused their attention on developing new ways to control arthritis. “We generated a number of hypotheses, or scientific guesses about what would work,” Stenberg said. “We synthesized new chemicals that we hoped would control arthritis, based on the database of what others were working on or had worked on previously. We tested the chemicals on animals. But despite our best efforts, their effectiveness didn’t exceed those on market.” Stenberg then turned his attention to cortisone, the miracle drug of the 1950’s that won the Nobel Prize in medicine for its arthritis control. But by the 1970’s, cortisone’s reputation was soiled by reported side effects of long-term use – increased bone deterioration, high blood pressure and weight gain.
The adrenal glands, located above each kidney, produce cortisone, which helps the body respond to stress; regulates the metabolism of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats; stimulates the liver to raise blood-sugar levels; and stems the body’s inflammatory response.
“If the body stopped producing cortisone, you would get Addison’s disease and die,” Stenberg said. “Cortisone is essential for life, is made by the body, for the body, without which we can’t live. Yet it was beaten up and trampled up and deemed improper to use for medicine. The question I had was how come the Creator put it in our bodies if it didn’t help us? It was a conflict I couldn’t resolve.
Stenberg resolved that conflict when his research led to the cortisone pulse discovery.
“The answer was relatively simple,” he said. “It isn’t daily production of cortisone that is faulty; the body also makes cortisone on demand for other purposes. The body gives itself an injection of cortisone when needed; much like a physician gives an injection to control pain or other problems. The body’s injection is silent, rapidly appearing and rapidly disappearing. That’s why my colleagues missed it.”
Stenberg’s theory was proven when researchers injected a chemical into the paw of a rat to cause inflammation. They then monitored the amount of cortisone in the rat’s blood. The concentration of cortisone increased by 12 times after 5 hours.
“In humans, when arthritis threatens, the body gives itself an injection and prevents the threat from becoming real,” Stenberg said.
When the body loses its ability to produce the cortisone pulse naturally, though, it needs a little help, he said.
“Cortisone can completely control arthritis, but can cause side effects if used improperly,” Stenberg said. “The key is to replicate the body’s mechanism. The body doesn’t give itself a cortisone injection daily, only when it is needed. Daily use isn’t natural, so that’s why side effects develop.”
With daily cortisone use, natural production wanes. As the natural production decreases, people with arthritis need more cortisone to control their pain. Knowing that high, daily doses have side effects, physicians usually wean patients off cortisone when they request more.
“My candidate for the greatest mistake in medicine is the decision made in the 1950’s to use cortisone daily,” Stenberg said. “When physicians used sufficiently high daily dosages to get the disease under control, side effects appeared. When they lowered the daily dosage to where the side effects disappeared, the disease reappeared.
In clinical trials Stenberg conducted, participants’ symptoms were first brought under control. Then, the patients were taught to make replacement pulses – in the form of a pill – when arthritis threatened and not at other times. The participants averaged 75 percent relief on cortisone and little on placebo. No side effects were observed. The results were independently duplicated and verified at the University of Alexandria School of Medicine in Egypt.
“We found that with controlled dosages of cortisone, based upon a person’s age, weight and sex, and by teaching self-administration of cortisone under physician supervision, we could virtually eliminate pain, swelling, tiredness and morning stiffness in five of six people within three weeks of treatment,” Stenberg said. “And the exciting thing is, we could do it for under $100 a year.”
The Effectiveness
Using the data he gathered during more than 20 years of research and clinical trials, Stenberg developed a protocol for arthritis treatment called Microdose Therapy. It is a physician-supervised, two-prescription treatment that is customized based on the disease, severity and medication history. Each client goes through a six-month education that includes patient control of cortisone, food allergy identification and control, antibiotics and a daily pain diary.
“Each patient rates the pain in each area on a scale of 0 to 10 – 0 is no pain and 10 is as bad as it gets,” Stenberg said “Simultaneously, the patient enters the amount of cortisone used that date. Our computer creates a graphic that charts progress, determines patient compliance, and recommendations for better symptom control and communication with the attending physician.”
Stenberg’s research has given hope to people such as Renita Rosenberg of Phoenix, who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia 20 years ago. To ease her pain, Rosenberg tried acupuncture, chiropractic, physical therapy, trigger-point injections, steroid injections and epidurals. She also took anti-inflammatory drugs, anti-depressants, muscle relaxers, pain pills and Lidocaine. But her pain kept getting worse.
“It got so bad,” she said, “I couldn’t function.”
She had to take a leave of absence from her job in educational software sales, a financial hardship for the single mother who is supporting a daughter in college. Her primary care physician, Dr. Klee Bethel, an anesthesiologist at Valley Lutheran Hospital in Mesa, learned about Microdose Therapy and referred her in July. Two months later, Rosenberg was back to work.
“My pain decreased 80 percent,” she said. “I was able to cut back on other medications by 75 percent, so I am in a much better mental state and my energy level is better. Now I can think. Before I couldn’t.”
Pain flares occur, Stenberg said, only when patients eat a food they are allergic to, break their routine or encounter a stressful situation.
“My arthritis pain had gotten so bad that I had to take 50 milligrams of morphine every day and pain pills on top of that,” said 87-year-old Raymond Heinhold of Mesa. “The pain was unbearable. When I started on Microdose in January, my pain level was over 200. Within three weeks it was down to 41. After three more weeks, the pain was completely gone.” Heinhold avoids the foods Stenberg identified as ones that can cause the pain to spike. “If I eat bread or anything made with white flour, I get the arthritis back,” he said. “I can have chicken and pork as long as it’s not fried. It has to be baked or done on the rotisserie. I can go a long time without any medication or pain as long as I stick with the diet.” As for the horror stories about cortisone, those on Stenberg’s protocol said they haven’t experienced any problems. “They scare people about the side effects of cortisone,” Rosenberg said. “But I’ll tell you I have had no side effects under the Microdoses I take. But I did have side effects from all the other drugs I took before."
Spreading the Word
Patient diaries reveal that more than 80 percent of the 3,000-plus people who have used Microdose Therapy have had their pain, swelling, tiredness and morning stiffness reduced within days – using medicine that costs less than $100 a year. According to an article in Newsweek, Americans spend more than $6.6 million yearly on arthritis drugs such as Vioxx and Celebrex (25 percent effective), Methotrexate (39 percent effective) and Enbrel (51 percent effective). Microdose outperforms all of them in effectiveness, the University of Alexandria study showed.
“The problem we have is that primary care physicians are crunched for time,” Stenberg said. “They have to pay for their building, for their support staff, for the utilities. The only way they can do that is with volume. They don’t have the time to look through a patient’s pain diary and analyze why their pain spiked.”
Some doctors, such as James A. Martin, former chief of staff at Mesa General Hospital, and Connecticut resident John B. Irwin, author of “Arthritis Begone,” have embraced Microdose Therapy. Both have treated more than 200 patients using Stenberg’s protocol.
In Dallas, Dr. Robert J. Koval has used Stenberg’s development to treat arthritic patients for two years. “The system gives control to the patient in treating their disease, which they like,” he said. “It actually gives them a numerical value as to when to treat and how much to dose. It takes a lot of guesswork out of the treatment plan and allows the patient to initiate treatment quickly with lower doses. This, in turn, reduces the severity of the arthritic flares because they can be nipped in the bud.”
Stenberg hopes others in the mainstream medical community will accept and use his findings.
“There isn’t a physician in the world who doesn’t want his patient to do well,” Stenberg said. “It’s not a deliberate decision on their part to keep people in pain. They aren’t rejecting Microdose because it’s bad. We’re just going to have to fight our way in just like anything else. I just wish I didn’t feel obligated to keep up the battle.”
Besides the promise he made to his wife 30 years ago to help relieve her pain, Stenberg has carried a heavy financial burden trying to help others. During the last three decades, Stenberg has spent $2 million on research and development.
“It’s a financial nightmare,” said Stenberg, who still subsidizes the development of the treatment and said he lost $68,000 in 2000. “But these people are really hurting, and we can pull them out of the pain. To see them be able to start living again is my reward.”
But his biggest reward? “I got a wife back,” he said. Helen Stenberg has been virtually pain-free since 1984, the year after her husband discovered the cortisone pulse the body produces. “You can’t put a price on creating a way to get people out of their prison of pain,” Virgil Stenberg said. “I rather suspect that I’ll be lost in the dust in terms of credit when all is said and done. And do I care? No….I just don’t want people sitting around in pain when this works. I want to help people like Helen out of their misery. I want to see them free of pain. It isn’t about riches. It’s about giving people their lives back."
Microdose Therapy avoids hydrocortisone-induced bone weakening
