Sanjay Gupta

Yeah, that was a tough one, Dr. Topol.

And just to give you a little context, a few years before she started developing symptoms of her autoimmune disease, very active.

I mean, we would do triathlons together.

We would do the Malibu triathlon out in your neck of the woods.

And then, you know, she started to get significant symptoms.

It was joint pain, sometimes rash.

She carried a diagnosis of psoriatic arthritis at times.

I remember talking to her once when she was in the throes of pain and I asked her to sort of point to where it hurt.

And she pointed to a place on her body and said, this is the only place that doesn't hurt on my body.

And so it was significant.

What ended up helping her, in addition to some of the various medications that are out there, and you see ads for a lot of these medications, Humira, the TNF blockers, things like that, which are very challenging meds because there's not a specific biomarker to sort of follow.

You have to just sort of see how someone's doing over weeks and months.

I think the thing that really helped her in addition to that was a very restrictive diet.

It was anti-inflammatory, but even more than that, it was just a very restrictive diet.

So she pared everything down to just basic white rice and baked chicken for a while and then slowly started to add things back in.

And that ended up really working for her.

I don't know, again, if it was TNF, tumor necrosis factor levels that went down, or if it was another inflammatory mediator.

Again, we don't measure these things.

But what I did know is that she felt better, she looked great, and she started to become more active again.

Yeah, you know, my mom's a perfectly healthy woman, very active, and she had a pretty innocuous sort of fall, seemingly, where she sort of fell into a sitting position while rolling her suitcase one day and had pretty sudden onset back pain.