how i see it is that enbrel/enteracept was used to support the long, drawn-out prednisone descent from the Relapsing Polychondritis disease process i am challenged by – i don’t believe it cured the disease
we used it to ‘fake my body out’ (so to speak) by severing the pain response characteristic of the process of weaning off the high-dosage prednisone. enbrel is so good at what it does that i had to be carefully educated to watch out for infections because i surly wouldn’t feel what was happening if my body was infected, and things could turn deadly without me even noticing it
as i understand it, that drug eats up (like a pac-man) the inflammatory cells running around in the joints aiming to latch onto receptors which consequently send out pain signals
that was the goal – so many times while i carefully, incrementally decreased the prednisone dosage (i was on high-dosage pred from ’95 – 2006) my body freaked out and the rpc would re-inflame
it was not my doctor’s idea to put me on that drug. a friend of mine was a nurse in a children’s ICU and met a dr who introduced her to enbrel. she told me about it and i proposed it to my rheumatologist who she said we could try it. the new drug was in its early trial stages and i think i remember it was being used for heart patients back then (something like that?). now, it’s being advertised on TV all the time
i think the reason they gave me a 5 yr prognosis in ’95 is because statistics showed that once a rpc patient finally got diagnosed and on the right medicine (after nearly-dying countless times, battling it out through periodic relapses before they figured it out and identified the disease and switched from treating it with antibiotics to steroids) the patient’s bodies had about a 5 yr tolerance for all the serious side-effects and complications of the drug they really needed to be on in the first place – steroids
and we all know that steroids can cause a massive mess in many of the body/mind systems of the body, requiring a lethal cocktail of so many/too many other drugs to handle all the life-threatening side-effects
as useful as steroids are is proportional to the severe and damaging side-effects they cause. i learned from a friend who had aids, that steroids are one of the few drugs that penetrate the blood-brain barrier, consequently affecting the brain and mind
maybe you disagree with some of the above and will educate me, so i do not misrepresent the truth
what i can say is that all of the above was my experience, no matter words and theories