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My entire foot around the joints of my toes, they were like red and inflamed and swollen. She reminded me of my grandmother when she lived with us and she was 90 and had a walker. But then you look at her and it's like, you're not my grandma. You know, you should be dancing down the street as you used to be.
There are no tests to make the diagnosis and where's it headed. A lot of the time we also have no definitive idea. And that's incredibly unsettling. I physically took my toe and tried to bend it and I could not do it. How terrifying would it be to fight an unknown enemy? One you didn't recognize and didn't see coming.
What if that enemy was coming from within? A disease that even doctors couldn't identify. Nearly half of all Americans suffer from some chronic illness and many struggle for an accurate diagnosis. These are their stories. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, and this is Symptomatic.
As a formerly trained dancer, Lauren's biggest strength has always been finding connection through movement. Dance was a place for seeking calm and creativity, as well as a way to push herself physically and mentally. Now a mother of two sons, Lauren may not dance as much as she used to, but she's found ways to apply that same passion to all aspects of her life as a wife, mother, and business owner.
I'm a dancer, a former dancer. I love dancing. I don't do it professionally anymore, but it is something that I will always have in my heart.
I am a mom. I'm a family-oriented person. My favorite thing to do on the weekends is watch my son play baseball and basketball and do active things with my kids. I'm extremely active. And you're a boy mom, so that's a good thing. Yes. Yes. My thing is fitness and nutrition. I run a business. I'm a full-time fitness and nutrition coach, and we help clients all over the United States and Canada.
Being that dance was such a driving force for most of her life, it seems only fitting that she met her now-husband Matt while country line dancing. She's very outgoing, very helpful. She loves to help others when she can. So leave it to me to meet the line dance instructor at the time. And I'm the guy with the two left feet that can't seem to figure it out. But...
She's very good at it. And then there's the fitness side of it where she's always been into eating right and trying to improve herself on a personal level. I mean, I eat, sleep and breathe, dance. You know, I close my eyes at night and do dance routines in my head. In the beginning of our relationship, she was...
very big in the dance industry. She did a lot of choreographing and she also did a lot of performing. She was in a bunch of different dance backgrounds. Ballroom to hip hop is where she started and she loved it. It just gave me a place to go when I needed it. I'm an only child. I didn't have people to play with so it just gave me something to be able to be my sounding board. So it became a lot to me.
Dance was more than just an outlet for Lauren. It was a way of life. She cherished the feeling of freedom and expression that dance provided her. But little did she know, an insidious illness would soon begin to erode the ability she had for the thing she loved most.
So take me back to the first time you remember seeing symptoms, physical symptoms that anything was a mess. And I think it was skin, correct? Yes. I was young when I started having skin rashes.
It was before high school that I started noticing these patches of skin. And I mean, I remember scratching them until they would bleed. They were so itchy and uncomfortable.
They were my elbows, my shins, my ankles. So it's not like it was on my face or anything like that. That would really make me super self-conscious about it, but it still didn't look pretty, right? So that's when I went to a dermatologist and the dermatologist diagnosed me with what they called at that point, dermatitis. They just said, here's cortisone cream. This is what we can give you.
But getting through high school, through college, even through getting married, I always had patches somewhere. They were always a part of me. Even as Lauren continued to excel at dance at increasingly advanced levels, her skin patches became unrelenting. Having the dermatitis diagnosis didn't seem to matter much because none of the topical treatments provided any real relief.
As Lauren pursued her dreams of becoming a professional dancer, she simply pushed her symptoms aside where they remained unresolved into her college years. So what happens when you get to college? How do your symptoms morph? How do they evolve? You know, I went to college in a very rural area. I was at Western Illinois University. It was cornfields and, you know, my environment changed.
I have bad allergies. Those were definitely affected with moving into a different area, different seasons, and my skin did actually get worse when I got to college. Her husband, Matt, remembers noticing the inflamed areas of skin near her ankles. She started seeing like skin issues. I used to give her a hard time. I'm like, stop touching that, stop scratching. And she's like, I'm not. And I'm like, oh, it looks like you are.
I did also start having issues where I couldn't do the things that I like to do as much anymore. So I started to feel like some stiffness in my legs and my feet. The bottoms of my feet would hurt when I'd go run. I was dancing in college. And so there were times where I would just have to take a break from practice because I just my body didn't feel good.
A college-level competitive dancer starting to see her body wear down has to be a little unsettling. Yeah.
So we would practice multiple times a week. This might be popping up for me, you know, once a month where it wasn't at that point in time affecting my day to day or week to week. But it was a pattern that maybe as an 18 year old, 19 year old college girl, I just wasn't quite aware of the frequency of which it was happening and the patterns that I was getting, quote unquote, worse.
That's so insidious, too, because it's so easy to say, I'm away from home for the first time. I'm eating different foods. I'm partying a little bit more than I could with parental supervision. Correct. Correct.
I had no idea that anything else was really brewing or anything else was going on. For me, the younger I was, the less I was really in tune with, you know, like, oh, I'm fine. You know, that's like what a teenager says, right? I'm fine. It'll go away. I'll be better tomorrow. And that's kind of where I went with it. The stiffening muscles and sensitive skin continued to linger, draining Lauren of the strength that used to be so readily available to her.
She used to have no problem getting up the energy to juggle studying and dancing, but now everything was beginning to feel more and more like a chore. It's like if you have a really bad head cold and you just feel completely bogged down by it,
It was this fatigue that just wouldn't go away. I came home from college at one point and got CAT scans of my sinuses to see, and yeah, my sinuses were extremely inflamed. They told me that it was, I had the option of getting sinus surgery or I could get put on different allergy medication or use nasal sprays. Like that was the extent of what they thought. And that must have been difficult for,
Psychologically for you too, because you've already said that dance in particular was this outlet, this escape, and now it's getting more difficult to really enjoy that outlet and escape. Yes, but I think also with that athlete mentality, mentally,
My heart was, you need to push harder. You need to try harder. You need to show up. You need to do the things. You need to keep working. So it wasn't even like, oh, I'm not really enjoying it anymore. It's that addiction. It's that hunger where, you know, you want to get better. You want to keep working harder. And that's where all of my energy was focused on, which sometimes meant ignoring the things that I probably shouldn't have ignored at that time.
During her last year of college, Lauren ended up contracting MRSA and a serious staph infection, which required multiple procedures to clear out of her system. This health setback forced Lauren to stop dancing and to move back home to properly recuperate.
This abrupt transition from a vibrant dance-filled routine to a more sedentary lifestyle took its toll on her body. But after she'd recovered, she was determined to get back into a fitness routine. And what better workout partner than her future husband?
I said to him, my foot feels funny moving through these workouts. He says, maybe you should take a step back. And I'm like, no, I'm like, I'm really getting results. I can work through it. And there comes my elite athlete mentality, right? I can work through it. I can work through it. What did you initially attribute that to? I mean, were you ever on point? Did you do ballet? Were you thinking that it was just like a leftover injury?
I figured that it was just too much wear and tear. I'd rest for a few days, a month would go by and it would come back. A month or two would go by and it would come back. But I always knew that if it came back, I'm like, that's my warning sign that I just need to take a few days off and I'll be fine in no time. So I did let that go for years.
Lauren and Matt married and soon after started their own family, welcoming two beautiful sons. But the journey through pregnancy and childbirth two times over exasperated Lauren's symptoms. With her focus on all the ups and downs of being a new parent, she continued to push her pain aside, not realizing a larger picture was starting to take shape. It wasn't until the signs became obviously beyond the postpartum norm that Lauren and Matt knew they had to take action.
Finally, it got to a point where I was doing laundry and like he's like, you are limping to the laundry machine. Like there is no no way that you are actually OK. She starts limping. It's like it's just weird. All of a sudden you're in your mid 20s and then you start limping and you're like, what's going on here?
Did you twist your ankle? Did you do anything? And it just kept seeing a trend of like different body aches and pains. And sometimes it switched from one side of her body to the other. It was really hard to understand.
My entire foot around the joints of my toes, they were like red and inflamed and swollen. And he's like, you need to put your feet up. Something is not right. And I thought, well, maybe I hurt myself. Normally when you hurt yourself, you could like...
pinpoint the time where you, you know, broke your foot or broke a toe. We weren't sure what it was. We just thought maybe it was after having a child, certain things happen to you that, I don't know, either change or take a long time to go back to the way they were. We had kids and right around the time I had my second son,
I was still avidly working out and training. And I got to a point where I could not do a lunge because my toes would not flex. That was where I was. And I got to a point where I physically took my toe and tried to bend it and I could not do it.
So it was like it was a fused solid bone as opposed to small bones that move in conjunction with one another. Correct. It was like, imagine something like completely rusted and you trying to move it like there was no give there. It was stuck. You must have felt so betrayed by your own body. Broken, completely broken.
Until now, her body had been her instrument, her outlet, her means of expression, but that was being quickly ripped away from her by these unexplained symptoms. Balancing the demands of her two greatest loves, dance and family, became an ongoing struggle.
I mean, Lauren's always been really good at pushing through and fighting for what she wants. It definitely got in the way of her day-to-day activities. And like, there's certain things like we didn't go to the zoo with the kids or go to certain things that you're going to have to be on your feet a lot because...
She knew she wouldn't be able to handle it or she'd be paying for it for days afterwards. So I left my dance career. It was an impossible choice for me to make. I think, you know, to be a professional dancer takes an extreme amount of work and perseverance and dedication and sacrifice to get to that level, which is where I was at. It was like crashing into a brick wall.
Lauren explained dance is almost her happy place, a safe place where she could just lose herself. What was it like to see her mobility challenged to go from forget about dancing, not being able to walk? What was that like to witness?
It was hard to watch. She struggled with it a lot just because she had so much creativity that didn't feel like work because she loved what she was doing. It was hard to see. You know, she had multiple occasions where she would get down on herself because she just couldn't do it and she couldn't understand why.
You have all of this momentum driving you forward. You're like, you're driven to get to where you're going. And then you come to this halting stop. And you can only push through it so much before it just starts to break you down. And if you know boys, when they're toddlers, you are doing nothing but trying to chase them down. As soon as they get moving, it is just a constant hustle. And it was tough. It was really tough. So I had nothing other to say than,
I can't play with my kid on the playground, but I can show up to work and dance with my dance partner. There's something that didn't seem right to me about that picture. And I had to, at that point, give or take something. And it was always going to be family over everything.
Despite setting dance aside, Lauren didn't lose her passion for improving lives through fitness. She redirected that enthusiasm into a career in personal training, providing empowerment in a much less taxing way. But with the tightness in her feet worsening and none of her at-home treatments working, she decided to go to a podiatrist in search of more effective solutions.
I thought I broke my toe. It was on one foot specifically at that point. And I said to my husband, I said, something's wrong. I don't remember breaking my foot, but it is bad to the point where I cannot move. We went into the podiatrist. I got x-rays. He's like, well, your toes not broken.
But you're not even 30 years old and we're seeing like advanced arthritis patterns in your joints. So that was kind of the first time I was like, what do you mean I have arthritis in my feet?
And we're like, well, she was a dancer. So I guess that could be a possibility. That also puts another curveball in the situation of like when we're looking at her feet. Is this like a byproduct of all the years of dance or is this something new?
Wow. I'm trying to wrap my head around that. So you are a young mother, very active, very health-oriented, and suddenly you're in a position where you're losing mobility entirely of one foot.
What was going through my head was he's wrong. Like there's no way I eat healthy. I am active. I exercise. I do all the things that you're supposed to do. And I'm only 26. There's just no way that it's a possibility that I have arthritis.
While the arthritis diagnosis didn't sit well with Lauren, it would lead to another clue. The podiatrist was examining her feet and noticed the rough skin patches on her ankles and knees. Though Lauren had been previously diagnosed with dermatitis, this looked different.
He said, I highly recommend that you go to back to your dermatologist and ask them to biopsy these skin patches to see if it is psoriasis. And he said, and if it is, your next visit is going to be to a rheumatologist. So the dermatologist, they did find that it is psoriasis. That must have been for both of you. Like who cares about the psoriasis? Right. We've got bigger fish to fry.
Yes, the skin issues were definitely not on like the top of the list to deal with. Her appearance of her skin and the different spots that she has were a drop in the bucket compared to like the joint pain and the discomfort that she had on a daily basis.
In the moment, it was difficult to decipher, but Lauren's symptomatic picture was coming into focus. So at that point, you must have been so frustrated. What's happening now in terms of your physical symptoms?
In my physical symptoms, I was beyond frustrated. I was at that point where this was happening much more frequently where I could not walk. I was in excruciating pain waking up in the middle of the night, even like laying in bed if your feet are covered and like the foot of your bed tucked in. Even that point,
pressure of trying to bend my toes if I was laying on my back would wake me up with throbbing pain in the middle of the night.
What would you say was the psychological impact? It was scary. It was almost scarier than the injury, the physical limitations that she had that we watched all the time. But like when you see someone mentally like slowly being broken down, it's a hard thing to watch and wonder where is this going?
You must have felt so helpless. Yeah, it's difficult. You mentioned at one point she was even on crutches without answers. What do you think was kind of rock bottom in terms of her symptoms? To be honest, like when she did have to actually use crutches and...
Couldn't even get inside from outside without taking five minutes. She reminded me of my grandmother when she lived with us and she was 90 and had a walker. It was just a very snail-type pace to get anywhere. But then, you know, you look at her and it's like, you're not my grandma. You know, you should be dancing down the street as you used to be. But it's just difficult to see it happen.
It was also difficult and frustrating fighting the unknown. Lauren's progressing physical limitations were increasingly interfering with her personal and professional life.
I figured, well, if my podiatrist was right about the psoriasis, then it's definitely worth at least taking a look into the rheumatologist, mostly because looking back at the patterns, looking back at the history, this pattern had been going on for, like I said, years and years and years.
Knowing Lauren's family had a history of autoimmune conditions, the doctor ran every blood test they could in hopes of finding a clue as to what was causing Lauren so much pain. But nothing came back conclusive enough to narrow down the root cause.
So here I was not being able to sleep, not being able to do anything. And I looked at this rheumatologist and I'm like, what can you do for me? We tried an oral immunosuppressant first and that was really tough for me. It did not work. It made me feel sick and also gave me pretty significant depression.
Matt, did you have fears that something much worse was going on? We did when we got deeper into it. Like, what could this be? Is this like a lifelong thing? Then you start looking into all these possibilities and, you know, scary when you start looking up stuff on the Internet because you normally don't find anything good.
Lauren felt everything was slipping away from her, her family, her passion, herself, all because this unexplained disease was overwhelming her system, and she had yet to find a doctor who could see the bigger picture. Do you remember just feeling so desperate that you didn't think you could handle it?
100%. I remember it was with that rheumatologist that I went in there in tears, on crutches, unable to live my life the way that I wanted to live. I, at that point was 26, 27 years old and I was not getting answers. We'll be right back with Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast.
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Lauren was at the end of her rope. She was no longer able to dance or play with her two young sons in the way she had always imagined. Movements and stretches, which had once been part of her normal warm-up routine, were now far out of her reach. Her feet and lower legs were stiffening to the point where she had to use crutches to walk. How would you describe that kind of pain to someone?
I always say it's like a throbbing pain in the feet. A lot of times, like I'd get out of bed and I would feel like I was walking on bruises. The stiffness is similar to like if you've broken or sprained like a finger and you're trying to move it. It's almost like when you're bending something that is not supposed to go that way.
What made her pursue more answers even harder after she kind of got like a generic answer was that she got put back in crutches because like I said, it would come and go and wave. Some days would be okay or a week would be okay. And then all of a sudden, for no reason, it would get terrible again. She wouldn't be able to walk. She wanted answers. She desperately needed them. And the doctor told me there was nothing I could do other than wait for it to pass.
Lauren needed a practitioner who would be her partner in this battle to help her break out of the pattern, listen to her story, and recommend new methods to help find the cause of her symptoms. So I do remember, like...
a cry out that I put on Facebook and just said, I need a rheumatologist that can help me. Can anybody give me a recommendation? And it was a neighbor of mine who recommended me to Dr. Erin Arnold, who, I mean, has taken the best, best care of me. I'm so happy to have been introduced to her. What was so different about Dr. Arnold's approach to
She was willing to listen. She felt for me. She also was, to me, way more thorough than the other rheumatologist that I was seeing before. She was looking at different types of blood work. She put in for what they call a vectra screening, which is a more in-depth evaluation of your inflammation. And my vectra test came back off the charts to the point where she's like,
I don't even know how you drove yourself here, which was so validating to me because I'm like, everyone else thinks I'm crazy because the typical inflammation markers that most people look at are not earth shattering. They're not alarming. They're maybe a little bit on the high side of what they call normal.
Dr. Arnold is a Chicago-based doctor who was inspired to become a rheumatologist after seeing her father's passion for the field. The allure for the detective work involved and the impact the long-term relationships can have on her patients cemented this as her specialty.
I will tell you that as special as Lauren is, her really, her story is not so unusual or unique. So if I think about my engagement with her, it's a similar engagement I've had with a lot of my patients.
Many of them women, though, because I do think it still is hard for women who are in pain to really be heard, even by other female doctors. Right. So when I remember meeting her, part of the impression I got when I first met with her was the I don't know if trauma is the right word, but the energy that she had was because I think she wasn't being heard.
Dr. Arnold made me feel like I was not crazy, but she also made me feel like there are so many options. And she also made me feel like we were not going to stop trying until we could find an option that worked. An approach that would ultimately lead to some answers in Lauren's medical mystery.
So one of the first things we wanted to try to differentiate was, is this an inflammatory disease that was causing her pain? And our suspicion was very high because she's young. What were the possible diagnoses running through your mind when you started seeing Lauren?
So sometimes you can see with people, for example, with severe endocrine disorders where maybe they have like hyperparathyroidism, which is a hormone that the glands sit near the thyroid. But if the levels get really high, they can actively go to break down the bone and that can cause pain. So that would have been one of the things we would look for.
Her history wasn't significant for something like a cancer, but we look for evidence of that in some of the standard blood tests that we draw. Right. So those would be other things that would be ruling out. We'd be making sure that she didn't have some type of a systemic infection that could be causing her symptoms.
I had no idea that one thing was linked to another thing, which was linked to the other thing. Who would have thought that my sinuses had anything to do with the excruciating foot pain that I was experiencing, you know, years later. And that is something that I was never able to link together. So, you know, looking at that, looking at my history, looking at all of my symptoms, even though my genetic marker was negative, she said,
Not everybody who has this condition has a genetic marker for it. So sometimes it's almost just as important or even more important to look at the symptoms and to be able to really evaluate the progression of how things have moved along. And she diagnosed me with psoriatic arthritis. Wow. And you're 28 years old at this point. 28 years old.
So Matt, take me to the diagnosis. You know, when you first heard those two words, psoriatic arthritis. Part of it was a relief because we had a diagnosis and there's treatment. But the other side of it is like, this is not technically curable, like entirely. There's no like magic medication that you take and it's like just gone in a week. You're done. You're all better.
Now, you did mention that you had to confirm that there was inflammation, but in terms of a gold standard for psoriatic arthritis, is there a specific test that you use? In fact, there are no tests to make the diagnosis of psoriatic arthritis. So our blood tests are helpful when they're helpful.
But most of the time, it's really history and physical exam and response to interventions. And this is where that long-term relationship really starts to develop and seeing people over time and how things change. But there is not a single blood test to...
to make the diagnosis of psoriatic arthritis. Well, often if we're lucky enough, see something like psoriasis or a history of psoriasis, we'll see targeted joints that we'll typically think about in either distal psoriasis, like specific distributions in the hands, for example, or larger joints.
So it is always easier to make a diagnosis of psoriatic arthritis when patients have psoriasis. But there is a large enough number of patients who don't develop psoriasis before their arthritis, but actually after their arthritis. The symptoms that have been shrugged off throughout Lauren's life were actually little clues, all adding up to give Dr. Arnold the full picture of what had been plaguing Lauren for 15 years, psoriatic arthritis.
It sounds like the symptoms can really run the gamut. That said, are there a list of most common symptoms? If you were to Google psoriatic arthritis, I think that for sure people would talk about swelling and stiffness in specific joints in the hands rather than the knuckle joint. People would talk about mostly skin psoriasis in association with psoriatic arthritis. People would
talk about morning stiffness that's greater than 30 minutes. So if you're not 25 anymore, when you get out of bed in the morning, you might feel a little bit stiff. But as you make your way to the bathroom, you notice that you loosen up. People with psoriatic arthritis, that's just ongoing. It could be for hours. What are some common misconceptions that people have about psoriatic arthritis?
I think it's really important for people to understand that there are like hundreds of kinds of arthritis. We simplify things, right? But there are all different kinds of arthritis. And so I think the misconception is
is that this is not just an illness that affects your joints. So I'm going to generalize the thing that as a rheumatologist, I worry the most about when I meet patients with inflammatory arthritis are actually not their joints. I worry about their heart.
I worry about their risk of cancer because we know that patients with inflammatory disease that is uncontrolled have a higher incidence of heart attacks, especially true in our psoriatic arthritis patients and a higher incidence of some lymphomas and cancers. And so I think the misconception is, oh, that it's just my joints. But when I say to people, the likelihood of your rheumatoid arthritis if left untreated causing a heart attack is
And that what kills patients with rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis is heart disease. What did that diagnosis mean for you? It meant a lot of things. It was validating to know that I wasn't crazy, that something was really wrong. And so there was a piece of me that felt relief that at least now we know what it is and now we can hopefully treat it.
It was scary for me. Also really hard because I knew a lot was going to have to change my lifestyle. I was scared. Was I ever going to be able to go dance again or exercise again? What was working out going to look like for me? I was in, you know, a full-time coach where running on the treadmill was part of my job. And I didn't know that I was going to be able to do that again. It gave her a direction of like where to like research so she can figure out how she wants to pursue life.
Moving forward and I mean you get some hope she's good at finding the good in things and like okay here's a new adventure or new project to try and work towards and you know make things better. It just occurred to me that really you do almost need to embrace the mindset of an athlete with these chronic illnesses because it's a marathon. It's not a race.
And you have to focus on the things that you can have control over. Right. And I think it's instinctual for all of us to number one, know what caused this, which often we have no idea. And where's it headed? What's the prognosis? Which a lot of the time we also have no definitive idea. Right. And that's incredibly unsettling. So you have to then be able to give over some of that wanting to control the outcome of
to kind of just go for the ride, right? To jump forward and to let's just keep moving forward is what I say to patients.
In some ways, I feel like it's given me the gift of being more in tune with my body because for so long, I ignored so many things. It has allowed me to identify triggers and things that trigger these episodes and inflammation. I can't say that I'm flare up free. I can't say that I'm in remission, but I can tell you that I can understand that my body can only tolerate so much exercise.
As Matt lovingly described her, Lauren is the eternal optimist. Despite having to give up dance and accept the physical limitations that can accompany her flare-ups, Lauren remains dedicated to moving forward and motivating others. What are you most proud of your wife for? I'd say I'm just most proud for like her resilience and trying to like not let her condition take over. She always is trying to
better herself physically and mentally. And she's always pushing to find the brighter side of things and not let anything get her down. So it's just nice to see. It pushes me too. All that passion, all of the love I had for dance, I mean, it's all still there. But I have been able to redirect that passion and fire to help others that are like myself, that are going through dealing with
inflammation, weight loss resistance, feeling exhausted or fatigued and all of those things. And so I took the majority of that energy and really put it into studying and understanding inflammation at another level so I could help others work through exactly what I work through and understand their bodies the way that I'm able to understand mine. I love that it's the same kind of imparting of empowerment. It's just knowledge now.
Exactly. And a knowledge that I so personally can relate to, right? Because I know those feelings of frustration and I know those feelings of, you know, when you're just, you're feeling defeated when you're dealing with something along the lines of battling, whether it's psoriatic arthritis or another inflammatory condition, right? And I want to help others be able to beat it the same way that I was.
And once you start to identify and understand what your body needs, what your body responds to is a life that is waiting to be lived by you. To find out more on psoriatic arthritis, you can check out the Arthritis Foundation's website at arthritis.org. My name is Lauren Scholl. I pushed through pain for 15 years before being diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis at the age of 28.
Since this is the final episode of Symptomatic Season 2, we wanted to say a huge thank you to all of our listeners. We truly value the opportunity to bring these episodes to life. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, if there's a story you want to hear us cover, you can get in touch with us by emailing symptomatic at iheartmedia.com. And please don't forget to rate and review Symptomatic wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, we hope you stay well.
Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast, is a production of Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. Our show is hosted by me, Lauren Breitpacheco. Executive producers are Matt Romano and myself. Our EP of post-production is James Foster. Our producers are Sierra Kaiser and John Irwin, and this episode was researched by Diana Davis.
What are real people with psoriatic arthritis saying about Cosentix? I had to do something. I started Cosentix. I moved better because of Cosentix.
Cosentix Secukinumab is for adults with active psoriatic arthritis and is given as a 150 milligram dose. Don't use if you're allergic to Cosentix. Before starting, get checked for TB. Serious allergic reactions, severe skin reactions that look like eczema, and an increased risk of infections, some fatal, have occurred. Cosentix may lower ability to fight infections, so tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms like fevers, sweats, chills, muscle aches, or cough.
Don't wait. Ask your doctor about Cosentix.
