Dr. Peter J. Weiss

Phil Mick­el­son, one of the best golfers in the world and the win­ner of  this year’s Mas­ters Golf Tour­na­ment, has devel­oped pso­ri­atic arthri­tis, a seri­ous and poten­tially inca­pac­i­tat­ing autoim­mune dis­ease.  This would be quite a blow to any of us, but must be espe­cially impact­ful to a top ath­lete like Mr. Mick­el­son.

Phil Mick­el­son

For­tu­nately, he reports that he’s doing rea­son­ably well right now on Enbrel a pow­er­ful immune system-suppressing med­ica­tion.  Oh, and he has also decided to become a veg­e­tar­ian.

A veg­e­tar­ian?  What’s up with that?  Well appar­ently Phil Mick­el­son is tak­ing charge of his health and health­care and wants to do things that may help him — even things that may not occur to doc­tors.  Nutri­tion is an obvi­ous place to start.  Will becom­ing a veg­e­tar­ian be part of the answer for Mr. Mick­el­son?  Quite pos­si­bly.

I’ve per­son­ally heard or read many sto­ries of indi­vid­u­als with autoim­mune dis­eases includ­ing arthri­tis, asthma and aller­gic dis­or­ders who’ve become com­pletely well fol­low­ing a rad­i­cal change in diet — often involv­ing veg­e­tar­i­an­ism, juic­ing and/or sup­ple­men­ta­tion.  And tak­ing Enbrel is no pic­nic.  The injectable med­i­cine may cause seri­ous, even life threat­en­ing, side effects.  I wouldn’t want to be on it either.

Mr. Mick­el­son should be con­grat­u­lated for his courage — courage in dis­clos­ing his diag­no­sis, tak­ing charge of his own care, and being will­ing to live dif­fer­ently from oth­ers.  It isn’t easy to keep an open mind or to do some­thing out of the ordi­nary.

Most of us would be at least a lit­tle scared.  What will peo­ple think?  What will my doc­tors think?  You can get a sense of that in Mr. Mickelson’s com­ment reported Tues­day by USA Today, “I know this is crazy, I know.  No, this wasn’t rec­om­mended by a doc­tor, I read a book and just thought maybe it will help. And if it helps my sit­u­a­tion, I’m all for it.”

No Phil, it’s not crazy and you’re not crazy.  You’re coura­geous!

Best wishes to you and your fam­ily.