Chris Kresser: Yes, not for the protocol necessarily, but I’ll give you some general information about that and then come back to some ideas. An analogy I often use, it’s not the best one, but I’ve yet to think of a better one, maybe you guys can help with that, but for anyone with, like, a local musculoskeletal issue like back pain or knee pain or something like that and they ask whether Functional Medicine can help, I explain that in any kind of localized inflammatory condition, which all of those would be, it will be worsened by a systemic inflammation. The analogy is like, if you have a bathtub and the rubber ducky is sitting on the water, the rubber ducky is the local inflammation and the water in the bath is the systemic inflammation. The more of the bathtub fills with water, the higher the rubber ducky is going to go, the higher the local inflammation will be. If you have a significant background of systemic inflammation, that’s going to make any local inflammation worse.
You might have experienced this first hand if you have an old injury or something like that, and then you get the flu, which causes a systemic inflammatory response, and then the back pain flares up or something like that happens. That’s one of the ways to explain it—what’s going on—to the patient. I think with soft tissue and cartilage mobility, it’s a similar thing. Certainly glycine is a very, very important amino acid for soft tissue and cartilage. It’s a major constituent of the soft tissue, so making sure they’re getting enough collagen in their diet, bone broth, fatty or cartilaginous cuts of meat, or supplementing with collagen peptides or taking glycine as a supplement is super important. Hyaluronic acid can be really helpful in these situations, often used for cartilage- and soft tissue-related problems. I think some of the systemic natural anti-inflammatories like curcumin and boswellia AKBA can be really helpful as well.