There appears to be no end to all the crazy things conventional medicine will do in justifying the use of botulinum toxin type A, better known as BOTOX, including the treatment of osteoarthritis, according to a report presented during this week's annual meeting of the American College of Rheumatology.
Out of an initial group of 15 patients, 10 of them responded well to BOTOX, which lessened their pain by 50 percent. These surprising results prompted scientists to test the efficacy of BOTOX in a current study on 37 patients over the course of a year.
So far, the early percentages based on the Western Ontario McMaster osteoarthritis index for severe pain look good with 55 percent of the BOTOX patients improving by at least 50 percent and 44 percent reporting an improvement by 50 percent or more.
What's really interesting to me: Two-thirds of the osteoarthritis patients receiving placebo treatments (saline plus lidocaine) reported a 30 or 50 percent improvement in their pain, proving once again the power of the placebo.
The safer, more natural course for relieving the symptoms of osteoarthritis without pills or injections: