joint integrity and found in high concentrations in healthy individuals.  Glucosamine stimulates cartilage synthesis keeping joints repaired thus relieving joint pain, tenderness and swelling.

      Due to excessive demand, wear and the gradual decrease of glucosamine in the body, it has been recommended that adding glucosamine to one's daily nutrition regimen could be beneficial.  Studies around the world appear supportive of this recommendation.  Arthritis patients taking Glucosamine sulfate reported a significant reduction in joint pain, tenderness and swelling.  Glucosamine appears to offer  substantial hope for the many sufferers of arthritis because of its beneficial effects and apparent lack of undesirable effects. 

"To be seventy years young is sometimes more hopeful than to be forty years old."-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Sea Cucumber

    Sea cucumbers are marine relatives of starfish and sea urchins.  They are enriched with many proteins and nutrients including muccopolysaccharides and chondroitins which can lubricate joints and connective tissues.  Proteins derived from Sea cucumber appear to have the desirable properties of being prostaglandin and leukotriene inhibitors. 

    In recent years a great deal of interest has been focused on understanding the roles that prostaglandins and leukotrienes play in our health.  These substances can contribute biochemically to inflammation and pain.  Indeed the standard anti-inflammatory drugs work, in part, through inhibiting prostaglandins and leukotrienes

Extra, Extra-Read all about it!

    In the middle of writing this I have just received notification from a major pharmaceutical company that their nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory analgesic drug introduced in 1997 for pain has been withdrawn from the market effective immediately.  Why?  The company took this action because of  "post marketing reports of severe hepatic (liver) failure, resulting in four deaths and eight liver transplants."  I mention this to emphasize that the currently used drugs can have nasty side effects and that other forms of therapy should  be considered.  Kidney (renal) failure and stomach ulcers are other common side effects seen with anti inflammatory drugs.