When I first started focusing on healing my body through natural methods, I still believed that certain conditions, like arthritis, were incurable. I believed what doctors told me, that once you were diagnosed, you needed to manage the condition with various drugs. I no longer believe that.
Recently, I had a guest on my podcast, who is also a very good friend. Phil Escott has lived through the kind of arthritis pain most people can’t even imagine, the kind where every single joint blows up and you can barely get off the sofa. He was on crutches, emaciated, and, in his own words, in suicidal levels of pain. And his rheumatologist told him exactly what so many of you have probably heard: “This is going to be with you for life. You’ll need medication for life. And by the way, that medication might shorten your life.”
Phil reversed his arthritis. Completely. Without drugs. And his story should make you furious, because it proves that what millions of people are being told about autoimmune conditions is, at best, incomplete, and at worst, dangerously wrong.
The Vegetarian Trap
Phil spent decades eating what he thought was the healthiest possible diet. He came from a spiritual background that valued vegetarianism, and when his joints started deteriorating in 2010, he doubled down. He went vegan, then raw vegan, then into juicing and fruitarianism. The result? He got thinner, weaker, and developed kidney stones on top of everything else.
Those kidney stones came from oxalates, which are one of the more harmful plant compounds that rarely get discussed. Oxalates are concentrated in many so-called superfoods, especially leafy greens like spinach. Under a microscope, they look like tiny shards of glass, and they lodge themselves in joints, kidneys, and other organs throughout the body. When you juice spinach and kale every morning, you can consume amounts that approach dangerous levels without even realizing it. Phil learned this the hard way, and the damage took years to undo. Sally Norton, author of Toxic Superfoods, told him that it can take decades for the body to fully clear stored oxalates.
The Carnivore Connection
Phil started noticing something interesting around 2015. On the days he skipped vegetables and ate only meat, he felt noticeably better. So he dropped the plants entirely and waited for the deficiencies everyone warned him about. They never came.
Instead, his joint pain receded. His energy returned. His body started functioning the way it was supposed to. He looked at anthropological evidence and saw the same pattern over and over: traditional hunter-gatherer societies eating 90 to 100 percent animal-based diets, depending on latitude and season, with no trace of our modern chronic diseases.
This is the part that tends to get people riled up, and I understand why. We have been told our entire lives that vegetables are the foundation of a healthy diet. But Phil’s experience, and the experience of thousands of others in the carnivore community, tells a very different story. When you remove the foods that are causing gut permeability and inflammation, the body does what it was designed to do. It heals.
Why Your Rheumatologist Might Be Wrong
Phil tried the conventional route first. He took sulfasalazine for about a month and had a severe reaction, including his fingers turning yellow and a psychotic episode from the drug itself. He switched rheumatologists hoping for a different approach, and when he told the new one he was going the natural route, the doctor became increasingly hostile.
When Phil returned to that same doctor’s office months later, visibly healed and off all medication, the doctor didn’t ask a single question about how he’d done it. Instead, he insisted Phil take methotrexate, a repurposed cancer drug, and warned him that the disease would spread to his heart and lungs without it.
This is something I see constantly in the medical world, and it breaks my heart. Patients who have found real solutions are dismissed, threatened, or flat-out ignored by the very people who are supposed to be helping them. Rheumatologists have generally never seen anyone reverse autoimmune arthritis because their entire framework is built around disease management, not resolution. When someone walks through the door without symptoms and without drugs, it doesn’t fit the model, so they reject it.
Meanwhile, Phil describes scrolling through Facebook support groups for rheumatoid arthritis with 80,000 members, all of them posting pictures of swollen joints, asking about liver damage from methotrexate, and suffering terribly. When anyone suggests looking into dietary solutions, they get called a quack.
Fasting as Proof
One of the most powerful points Phil made was about fasting. He realized early on that when he stopped eating entirely, his inflammation dropped dramatically within a couple of days. That told him something his rheumatologist would never admit: the pain was directly connected to what he was putting in his body.
Phil has experimented with both water fasting and dry fasting. He found dry fasting to be more powerful for his specific issues because it preserves muscle mass better and works faster. He shared a remarkable story about a burst Baker’s cyst behind his knee that doctors said would take weeks or months to reabsorb. He did a four to five day dry fast, went back to the hospital a week later, and the fluid was completely gone. The doctors had never seen anything like it.
Now, fasting isn’t something to take lightly, and Phil was clear about that. If your resting heart rate climbs above 120, back off and take some electrolytes, water, and salt. Listen to your body. There are also practitioners who supervise extended dry fasts for people with serious conditions. But the point is this: if removing food removes your symptoms, then the food is the problem, and no amount of methotrexate is going to fix that.
The Dairy Question
Phil brought up something that I think a lot of carnivore and keto people need to hear, especially women dealing with autoimmune issues or stubborn weight. Dairy can be a hidden obstacle.
He and his partner Detta both gave up dairy when she was healing from Graves’ disease, following the recommendation of Dr. Zsofia Clemens at Paleo Medicina. Phil expected to miss it but was surprised by how much better he felt. His chronic sinus congestion cleared up within a week, and he dropped stubborn belly fat without changing anything else about his diet. The inflammation from dairy had been subtle enough that he didn’t recognize it until it was gone.
Dairy contains growth factors designed to turn a small animal into a large one very quickly. That kind of rapid cell replication is exactly what a calf needs, but it can work against a human body that is trying to heal. If you’re dealing with autoimmunity or you’ve hit a plateau with weight loss, cutting dairy completely for at least 90 days is worth trying. No cheese, no butter, no ghee, no kefir, no raw milk. Use tallow instead as your primary cooking fat and see what happens.
The 30-Day and 90-Day Rule
Phil works with clients who are terrified of giving up their favorite foods. He tells them: give it 30 days. Anyone can do almost anything for 30 days. By that point, most people notice that their cravings have faded significantly and the health improvements are impossible to ignore. Then stretch it to 90 days.
The 90-day mark is where things really start to change at a deeper level. Phil calls it a magical window for healing, and I’ve seen the same thing in my own practice. By three months on a strict carnivore protocol, most autoimmune symptoms have calmed substantially, cravings for processed food have largely disappeared, and people start saying the same thing: “I’m never going back.”
The reason the first 30 days are the hardest comes down to addiction. Phil made a point during our conversation that stopped me in my tracks, even after all my years in this field. He pointed out that the combination of fat and carbohydrates together almost never occurs in nature. Berries and fruit have carbohydrates but very little fat. Fatty meat has fat and protein but no carbohydrates. When food manufacturers combine the two, as in pizza, ice cream, chips, and chocolate, it hijacks your satiety signals so you never feel full. You keep eating. That combination is engineered to be addictive, and breaking free from it takes time and patience.
It’s About Confidence
If there’s one message Phil wants people to take away, it’s that healing autoimmune conditions through diet requires confidence above everything else. Confidence that the ancestral evidence supports this way of eating. Confidence that temporary symptoms during the healing process don’t mean the diet is failing. Confidence that weight loss during the detox phase is normal and temporary, and that the body will rebuild once the gut integrity is restored.
The medical system is designed to strip that confidence from you. When a rheumatologist tells you that arthritis is permanent and your only option is a drug that requires regular liver monitoring, it creates a kind of learned helplessness. Phil sees it in those Facebook groups every day, thousands of people who have given up because they’ve been told there’s no way out.
There is a way out. Phil lived it. Twice, in fact, since he had a serious relapse in 2022 and healed again in about three months, much faster the second time because he never doubted the process. If you’re dealing with arthritis or any autoimmune condition, I encourage you to listen to the full episode of this interview on The Aging Games podcast and visit Phil’s website at philescott.com. He offers one-on-one consultations and has an outstanding course called Autoimmunity: The Subtraction Method that walks you through the entire process.
Your body has every system in place to heal itself. Sometimes the hardest part is believing that’s true.
