Micro Pain Manager
Arthritis sufferers find
relief in cortisol microdoses
by Tammy Swift, The Forum
At the age of 59, Oliver
Sorenson thought he would have to spend the rest of his life in a nursing
home. The Ada, Minn., farmer had
developed such bad arthritis that he could barely lift his arms to comb his
hair or dress himself without assistance.
“I figured life was over,”
he says. The Sorensons were seriously
considering an around-the-clock care facility for him when his wife suggested
they check out one last option:
Microdose cortisol treatment.
The treatment, developed
by retired University of North Dakota professor Virgil Stenberg, teaches
patients to take microdoses of the hormone cortisol only when the body needs
it. Used this way, Stenberg claims
symptoms in auto-immune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia
can be relieved without harmful side effects.
Within weeks of taking
prednisone, a synthetic form of cortisol, Sorenson says he felt significantly
better.
That was 20 years
ago. Today, Sorenson reports that he is
pain-free “95 percent of the time”
and only takes a prednisone tablet a couple
of times a month. “I told Virgil today,
thanks for the last 20 years,”
Sorenson says.
Now one of Stenberg’s
clinics has opened in Fargo. So far,
nurse practitioner Tracy Beecher has treated 40-plus patients with microdose
therapy at the new clinic in the LilyCare Building in West Fargo.
A former nurse practitioner
in neurosurgery at Essentia Health in Fargo, Beecher says she got involved with
microdose therapy as a favor to a friend.
Soon, she found herself convinced by the treatment’s results.
“The changes are just
astronomical,” she says.
A skeptic converted
The friend who introduced
Beecher to microdose therapy is the Rev. Vern Baardson.
Baardson’s arthritis was
once so severe he had to give sermons while sitting down and took five minutes
to climb out of bed in the morning.
The disease had been in
remission for years but flared up again last year. Baardson noticed he could barely get around
the tennis court on certain days and struggled to play his beloved guitar.
“The thing that really
pushed me is when I started losing use of that hand,” says Baardson, a pastor
at Triumph West in West Fargo. “I’ve had
it so bad that it really scared me.”
Baardson discovered he was
allergic to many of the powerful medications prescribed by doctors.
Then he heard about a
Moorhead teen who found relief from arthritis with microdoses of cortisol. He attended an informational seminar, hanging
around afterward to ”ask some hard questions.”
“I was born an incredible
skeptic. This sounded like snake-oil
stuff to me,” he said.
But with few options in
sight, Baardson asked his physician to work with him on a microdose
regimen. The doctor refused. So he approached Beecher, a frequently tennis
partner.
“He was at the end of his
rope,” Beecher says. She decided to help him out.
Baardson saw a quick and
dramatic improvement. He could run again
and pay guitar without pain. As an
added side benefit, his psoriasis began to clear up.
The cortisol riddle
The medical community has
long known that cortisone effectively controls the pain and inflammation of
arthritis.
The problem is that
long-term, high-dose use of the hormone causes severe side effects: bone loss,
weight gain, bleeding under the skin, cataracts and an unnatural rounding of
the face called “moon face.” Long-term,
high-dose cortisone use can cause the adrenal system to shut down and stop
producing natural cortisol.
Fearful of its many side
effects, doctors long ago abandoned cortisone as an arthritis treatment,
favoring instead high doses of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or
NSAIDs.
But when Virgil Stenberg’s
own wife, Helen, was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, he developed a
special interest in how it was treated.
His wife lived in constant pain, had to take massive amounts of
medication and received 18 surgeries on her hands, knees, hip, wrists and toes.
Stenberg thought there had
to be a better answer. Armed with a
doctorate in biochemistry, he turned his attention to the long-shunned
cortisol. He knew the human adrenal
gland daily secretes a small level, natural dose of cortisol and that it’s
essential to the body’s healthy functioning.
“I thought, ‘It’s made by
the body, it control inflammation perfectly, so what mistake have we made in
logic (in using it)?” says Stenberg, now retired and living in Mesa, Ariz.
In 1983, while reading a
book on hormones, Stenberg had an epiphany.
He realized that when the body suffered injury or inflammation, the
adrenal glands produced a massive spike of cortisone. That spike, or “pulse,” would reduce the
inflammation before dropping to normal levels within 10 hours.
Tests on laboratory rats
confirmed his suspicions. Stenberg
realized people with arthritis couldn’t seem to produce that big pulse of
cortisol any more. As a result, their
bodies could no longer control inflammation, resulting in severe, long-term
inflammation and autoimmune disorders.
The answer, Stenberg
deduced, was to amp up the weakened cortisol response by giving a booster dose
of man-made cortisol or prednisone, only when it was most needed. The prescribed amount would fall within
FDA-recommended levels and be stopped when the person’s pain subsided. Used this way, cortisol’s side effects would
be minimal.
A double-blind study on
human subjects confirmed his theories.
In the trials, 86 percent of rheumatoid arthritis patients treated with
his therapy averaged a 75% reduction in pain.
Treatment has critics
Microdose therapy requires
plenty of vigilance on the patient’s part.
The patient must check in regularly with his doctor, plus keep a daily
pain journal in which he rates, on a scale of 0 to 10, the pain level in all
affected joints and tissues.
If the total pain score is
high enough to indicate an imminent flare-up, patients take just enough
cortisol over a five-day cycle to
provide the booster pulse they need.
“We want them to be off
the medication more than they’re on it,” Beecher says.
She likens the daily
monitoring to how a diabetic learns to monitor blood sugar.
In efforts to control
inflammation, patients also receive a blood test to screen for 90 different
food allergies and may receive antibiotics to combat any existing infections.
The pain journals of every
patient are entered into a software program for data analysis. Based on their data, Stenberg says
fibromyalgia patients have reported an average of 77 percent symptom relief
while rheumatoid arthritis sufferers report 80% relief.
The results make some
wonder why more people haven’t tried this therapy.
The biggest roadblock,
Stenberg says, is that the medical profession has been trained to fear
cortisone.
“The paradigm that
cortisone has side effects is a paradigm that is incorrect,” he says. “This paradigm has done more damage and
caused more pain and suffering than any other state(ment) in the history of
medicine.”
He points to patients who
have been on microdose therapy for 20 years yet have strong bones, good vision and
normal body weights. That group includes
his wife, Helen.
Stenberg, now 77, also
says he doesn’t have the resources or influence to convince Medicare or other
insurance companies to pay for the treatment.
(A few patients have been able to get some costs reimbursed by Blue Cross
Blue Shield of North Dakota, Beecher says.)
As a result, patients have to pay an upfront cost of $6,995, although
Stenberg says he’s willing to offer a money-back guarantee to anyone who
doesn’t find relief.
The treatment also has detractors, including a couple of the co-investigators on
Stenberg’s 1992 clinical trial. They
criticized Stenberg for claiming his treatment could help all
inflammation-related maladies when the research only involved people with
rheumatoid arthritis.
Stenberg replies that
cortisone has long been approved for all kinds of inflammation, and so it makes
sense that microdoses of it would also alleviate other inflammatory
diseases. His detractors, he says, “are
right as scientists but I’m right in theory.”
Stenberg says the
mainstream medical community first viewed him with suspicion but now seem to
see him as a harmless maverick. “The
powerhouses in medicine are looking at us and saying, ‘You’re not killing
anyone, and you’re getting a lot of good reports, and we’ve got a lot of other
concerns out there that are worse.”
And for patients like
Baardson, the proof is in the pain-free results.
“Skeptic that I was at one
time, I can’t see why anyone wouldn’t want to do this,” he says.
Tammy Swift
