My name is Dr. Michael Lawson, and I’m a board-certified rheumatologist with over 27 years of experience helping patients with arthritis, chronic joint pain, and inflammation.
I graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School and dedicated my career to reducing pain and restoring mobility.
For most of those years, I followed the same standard approach doctors are taught:
prescribe painkillers, recommend physical therapy, and hope the patient improves.
But here’s the truth… I was getting it wrong.
I’ve come to realize that much of what we do for joint pain doesn’t actually solve the problem
It just masks the symptoms.
And knowing that now, I feel regretful and even a little guilty.
That’s why I’m writing this today.
I can’t stand the thought of more people living with constant stiffness, swelling, and pain because of the mistakes doctors like me have been making for decades.
Don’t get me wrong… I wasn’t intentionally misleading anyone.
I was working with the best information I had at the time.
But what I recently discovered has already changed my patients’ lives — and it could change yours too.
It started with one patient: a woman named Sarah.
What happened to her completely shifted how I think about joint pain.
Sarah had lived with daily joint pain for as long as she could remember.
What started as a dull ache in her knees became a constant stiffness that made even simple things
walking her dog, climbing stairs, bending down feel like a chore.
Like most people in her position, she tried everything:
Over-the-counter painkillers that upset her stomach.
Expensive creams that smelled awful and wore off within an hour.
Weekly physical therapy sessions that only helped for a few days at a time.
“I felt like I was 90 years old,” Sarah recalls.
“I missed hiking. I missed dancing. Even getting out of bed in the morning was something I dreaded.”