Book Review: Healing Arthritis by Susan Blum

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In February 2021, one month after a rheumatologist looked at my bloodwork and told me the pain in my hip and hands had a name (rheumatoid arthritis), I did what writers do when life detonates: I bought a stack of books. Healing Arthritis by Dr. Susan Blum was the first one I finished — and five years and one remission later, it’s still the one I hand to people.

The spoiler-free premise (can you spoil a medical book? Let’s not find out): Dr. Blum is a functional medicine doctor who has dealt with arthritis herself, and her three-step program goes after it at the root. Heal the gut, use food as medicine, and unwind the stress that keeps your immune system stuck in attack mode. It’s the rare book written by a doctor who has also been the patient.

What I Loved About Healing Arthritis by Susan Blum

Reading this one month after my diagnosis rearranged something in my head. Every pamphlet and appointment up to that point had leaned on the word incurable, and Dr. Blum was the first voice telling me my joints weren’t doomed to a downhill slide. Food could be medicine. The gut could be treated. I could be a participant in my own recovery instead of a bystander holding a prescription. I closed the book and recommitted to healing an incurable autoimmune disease with functional medicine (how hard can it be?).

Her credibility is the double kind: she’s lived with the disease and she’s spent years treating it in other people, and both experiences show up on every page. Fun fact: when I logged this book on Goodreads back in 2021, I promised I’d eventually write a blog post about where all of it led. It took five years, but that post exists now, and it has a happy ending — I’ve been in full remission, medication-free, for over two years.

The standing reminder before we go any further: I’m a writer, not a doctor (I had zero interest in staying in school that long), so nothing in this review is medical advice. It’s the story of a book that met me at the exact right moment. Bring your own care team.

What I Didn’t Love About Healing Arthritis

Not much. If you’ve already read her first book, The Immune System Recovery Plan, you’ll recognize a chunk of the foundation here, because the two books share DNA and the gut-healing material overlaps. I didn’t mind. Some lessons deserve to be taught twice, and I needed the arthritis-specific version. But if you’re only buying one, know that they’re siblings.

Final Thoughts on Healing Arthritis

This is the book I recommend first to anyone dealing with inflammatory anything, not because it’s magic, but because it pairs hope with homework. Hope without a plan is a greeting card. This book is a plan. If you want the long version of what happened after I read it (the nutritionist, the integrative rheumatologist who actually listened, the two unglamorous years of protocol), it’s all in my remission essay and the year three update.

My final score: 5 out of 5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Do I recommend this book? 👍 Yes — for patients, for the people who love them, and for anyone who’s been handed the word “incurable” and wanted a second opinion.

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