01/14/2021
I was out shopping today at one of the giant "club" superstores. I saw a huge display of glucosamine with MSN on sale and I just want to give my perspective on this because this product without containing chondroitin misses the boat by a great deal, both from a physiological standpoint and my professional and personal experience.
Up until the late 1990s it was always felt that cartilage did not heal or reproduce. Personally I was wearing a knee brace on my right knee to play baseball and tennis and complete extension and flexion was agonizing at that point. Long story why I kept delaying surgery to remove all the damaged and torn cartilage but I was holding out. I was reading a veterinary journal one afternoon and there was an article on cats and how cartilage was being rehabilitated in their knees through a supplement of glucosamine and chondroitin. The study was being done at my school, Michigan State University, so I called one of my old professors and asked if he knew about it. He did and extolled the virtue of the products as producing unbelievable results on torn, abraded, and chinked cartilage. He explained that physiologically we do actually reproduce a minute amount of cartilage daily but that we have an enzyme that breaks down a minute amount daily as well, resulting in zero progress. Glucosamine basically provides the building blocks for cartilage to be produced, but it is the chondroitin that acts to block the enzyme from breaking it down. This is oversimplified, but in effect that is the story. he said it takes 3 months to begin to see improvement (surgically viewed) and about 6 months to complete the process for most tears. I told him about my knee and asked where I could get some of this stuff, but he said it wasn't approved for humans. dogs or cats as yet, but was available for horses.
I called an equine distributor I was using at the time and asked him to encapsulate a bunch for me. Long story short, 6 months later, no more brace, no more pain, could have done the Russian Cossack dance if I ever could have in the first place. I stopped taking it after 6 months and 2 years later tore up my knee again. Arthroscopy was recommended, again, and again I skipped surgery and gave the glucosamine and chondroitin a chance to work a second time. Same result. No pain, full flexibility. I have since torn up me knees at least 7 times, never had surgery. I now have a torn meniscus in my left knee (3 years) and both are torn in my right knee ( years?). However I take my gluc and chon every day now and I am relatively pain free and functional because the supporting cartilage is still pretty healthy. Functional enough to play baseball last October in Arizona every day for 6 days and tennis now. So, THIS STUFF WORKS.
Professionally, I have done many cruciate repair surgeries early in my career as a veterinarian. My patients with or without surgery who experienced torn ACLs or just cartilage tears always exhibited pronounced swelling on the medial (inside) aspect of the injured knee. Since gluc and chon was approved for dogs it minimizes that effect by 50% or more.
To those of you who are reading this on my Valley Vet page, this just a regurgitation of what I've professed for years, but PLEASE, do not be fooled by the less expensive glucosamine without chondroitin, because I believe it will not be effective and your dog will suffer for it. To my friends who have tried it at my behest, same idea. Glucosamine and chondroitin together!
