theantichick

It can be really tough. My wife has Lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and Raynaud's disease. She's dealt with skin cancer, cervical cancer and a brain tumor since we've been married. Every time she finally starts losing weight she ends up with a flare and she has to go back on prednisone. My hat is off to you, I can see how difficult it really is for someone with autoimmune issues.

On a side note, have you looked into immunotherapy? As soon as we have the cash we will be heading back to Mexico for immunotherapy to cure her Lupus. The medicine base that she needs should be available again by the time that we have the money. Five thousand to cure her Lupus is the deal of a lifetime.

I'd need to know more about the treatment you're talking about. The current standard of therapy if DMARDs fail is also called immunotherapy, but it's not a cure, it's infusion of one or more biologic drugs. If you have info you can post or PM me, I'd happily look at it. Right now, we're using sulfasalazine and getting partial relief from it. I'm also very lucky in that I had a diagnosis very quickly comparatively speaking, and the diagnosis was made before any detectable damage was done to my joints. So we're working through the treatment protocols to get me the best relief as well as inflammatory suppression. We haven't maxed out sulfasalazine yet, if we do and need something else plaquenil is the next therapy to try, then if that failed we'd move to biologics.