I've found something that may be a cure

This may be a bit wordy, but please bear with me.  In recent years my digestive tract has been acting up badly.  I was taking Prilosec, dicyclomine, Tums and beano to deal with it.  Then a very nice lady at church gave me some kefir, which is basically a natural, home-grown type of probiotics.  I started cultivating the kefir grains and brewing my own kefir drink.  It made a *huge*difference and I was able to go completely off all my IBS type drugs and substances.  After a while I stopped drinking the kefir and the IBS didn't come back, so I kind of forgot about it for a while.

About a year and a half ago I got frozen shoulder in my left shoulder.  A month of the "can't reach behind my back and hurts like h**l if I try" and then a physical therapist suggested I try icing the shoulder.  That caused the muscles in my arm to start spasming and suddenly I was accelerated into "pain on the verge of going postal all the time, gets worse at night, can't sleep, etc".  That went on for three months and then abruptly got better.

A couple of months later I got it in the other arm.  This one was a bit different, the first stage dragged on for seven months but never seemed to get bad (I thought I was going to escape that phase, ha,ha, foolish me) and then suddenly I was in constant pain and couldn't sleep more than a couple of hours before the shoulder pain woke me up.  Nothing helped but a really hot bath, and even that only bought me an hour or two at best. This went on for a month.

Then I started having a mild flareup of the IBS, so I brewed up some kefir and started drinking it.  I like to drink it just before bedtime as it makes me sleepy sometimes.  The morning after my first dose of kefir I woke up after seven hours of uninterrupted sleep, and best of all, my arm didn't hurt all that much (prior to that mornings were a huge pain for me).  At first I thought it was a fluke but I have been drinking kefir every night for the past week and a half and there has been a *huge* improvement in my shoulder.  It is improving so fast I can actually see a difference in range of motion every day.  Yesterday I was able to reach the seat belt on the passenger side.  I absolutely couldn't do that 2 days ago.

Then I started thinking back and I realized that the last time I'd had frozen shoulder, the end of my three months of extreme pain had ended during the month of drinking kefir.  At the time I didn't connect the two because it never occurred to me that my digestive tract would have any connection to frozen shoulder.

Since then I've been doing a bit of research into the ailments that kefir is supposed to help, and I noticed a lot of people who mentioned allergies and auto-immune as conditions that kefir had cured for them.  I also recall that someone in the frozen shoulder group on Yahoo mentioned a theory that allergies or auto-immune reactions may have had some kind of connection to frozen shoulder.

The kefir that I'm drinking is a water based kefir; I imagine the milk based kefir would have the same effect.  If anyone wants to try it I wouldn't recommend you just go out and buy products advertising "kefir" in teh stores.  They're really expensive, for one thing, and I'm guessing the concentration and quality of the bacteria in them wouldn't be very high.

Kefir's strength is that it has a bunch of live "good bacteria" that populate your gut.  Processing foods would tend to kill off a lot of them, I'm guessing, and at the very least dilute them.  Get some live kefir grains and ferment your own fresh kefir.

I'm really excited about this possible cure.  Maybe a little giddy as well   Only those of you suffering this aweful pain can imagine what a blissful relief the sudden cessation of pain can be.

I'd love to hear if kefir works for anyone else.  Please let me know if you have tried it, whether or not it works.  I don't want to be blathering to people about a cure that exists only in my hopeful imagination.

Live kefir grains should be available if you just google for "kefir" (the water based kefir is called tibicos).  If you live in the NW US and happen to be in the Portland, OR area I'd be glad to give you some of mine.  If you treat it right your kefir should double in bulk every couple of weeks and I usually have extra in the fridge.

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