The Insulite System for Healthy Joints

This site contains a large amount of research, ideas, and concepts that are centered on helping you improve your life and on reducing the impact of joint pain on your wellbeing.  You could take this information, organize it, and structure your own plan around it. If this is your aim, we are glad to have helped provide that guidance.

On the other hand, you might find that there is so much information that a pre-developed self-management program better suits your needs. This is why we created our 52-week support program. It contains the key elements from the areas of diet, nutrition, exercise, stress management, and other areas carefully woven into a system. These elements are provided to you in a graduated, week-by-week format, which provides a structure so you don’t have to.

About Evidence-Based Support

It is important to understand a few things about the level of evidence in the field of medicine as it relates to joint pain and to how one uses evidence before a full medical consensus is formed.  Doctors around the world are still trying to sort out what goes wrong within our joints that leads to joint pain and arthritis.  This includes what leads to arthritis, what causes arthritis to progress to more severe forms, and what we can do to slow or reverse the process.  There are thousands of studies, some of which point strongly in one direction and some of which are promising, but conflicting.  This is not unexpected, since there is so much variation in the history, genetics, lifestyle, dietary habits, psychological make-up, habits, and other forces that come to bear upon an individual.  In other words, while joint pain is the common symptom, the complex ways in which many people come to develop joint pain means that sorting out the triggers does not lend itself to a single answer.

Nevertheless, doctors must wade through this sea of evidence and come to some conclusion about how to best proceed, even though we have a measure of uncertainty.  More succinctly, we cannot wait until all the evidence is in and until everyone agrees.  Therefore, posed as a question, "Are there recommendations that can be safely made even though we don't fully understand or we don't fully agree on all the things that affect an individual's joint health?"  One of the first considerations we have in answering this question is, "Is the recommendation likley to do harm?"

In formulating the Insulite System for Healthy Joints, we have reviewed thousands of studies and incorporated the opinions of thoughtleaders in the various fields important to joint health.  This includes the fields of rheumatology, sports medicine, exercise physiology, nutrition, psychology, neuroscience, biochemistry, cell biology, physiology, and many others.  In crafting our plan, we have kept the question of the saftey of our recommendations foremost.  While people in the field may think there is not a consensus of opinion on whether a specific recommendation can specifically benefit joint pain (or at least not in everyone), we believe that the recommendations summarized within our plan would be considered to be conducive the generalized good health, an improved sense of well-being, and an improved quality of life.

For example, we write about the importance of  a process called glycation, which is when sugars link to joint proteins, causing aging and stiffening of cartilage and ligaments.  Doctors know this is an important harmful process in joints, based on thousands of published studies.  They just cannot yet say how extensively this contributes to joint pain and arthritis, so it has not yet made its way into the standards of practice within medicine.  However, doctors do know and they do agree on how damaging the process of glycation is in disorders like diabetes.  In fact, one of the primary meausures of diabetes controle in blood is a glycated protein called glycosylated hemoglobin, known to most people as hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c). 

We believe it is only a matter of time before the same view is held about arthritis.  Therefore, we have taken the position that glycation is a highly significant influence on joints, that the recommendation is safe, and that the recommendation would convey general health benefits.  In other words, we mainain that reduction of dietary sugars and maintaining control over one's blood sugar is a good health practice. It just so happens that managing sugars is likely to have an influence on joint integrity.

We have included references on this site to review papers that have tried to sort out some of the differences of opinion and some of the conflicting studies about factors that influence joint pain.  As you read these, keep in mind that these types of inconclusive or conflicting findings are not unusual in medicine.  There are no simple answers to these complex problems.  There is no single influence on development of a disease process.  But there are steps that will clearly influence an individual's health and his or her quality of life.  Our program has tried to carefully assess the current research and devise a strategy aimed are preserving this quality of life.

Where We Get Our Information

Insulite Labs is dedicated to developing evidence-based self-management programs.  In support of this, we utilize the standard medical information resources used by universities, government agencies, hospitals, and clinics.  For instance, the National Library of Medicine is the world's largest repository of published medical research in the world  (www.nlm.nih.gov).  Our team is engaged in daily, dedicated searches of the NLM in an effort to provide our customers with updated information, as well as to gather data that will help develop and refine our self-management protocols.

We also regularly review government sites, thoughtleader forums, and consensus panels--resources that provide guidelines and opinions on the state of the evidence.  This allows us to monitor opinions and identify areas of disagreement.  These include, but are not limited to, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (www.hhs.gov), the FDA (www.fda.gov), the National Institutes of Health (www.nih.gov), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.cdc.gov).

Our goal is to provide tools that others can use to enrich their lives.  We do this because we like it and because we care about others.