Gary Gardner - Back On Top

Gary Gardner is an 81 year old former Chartered Chemist who now spends much of his retirement helping organise events for Rotary International. But shortly after lockdown Gary found that pain in his knees began to impact even the simple things in life.

This is Gary’s story…

I got my degree in chemistry and spent my career as a Chartered Chemist, working closely with companies - including pharmaceutical electronics - universities and research labs. I’ve never been much of a sporty person myself; I played a little bit of tennis when I was younger but I’ve always preferred to watch sport. Recently my wife and I have been helping organise a fun run for Rotary International.

During the pandemic I was keen to get out and stay active as we’d been told to do. But I started to develop a bit of pain in my knees. I’m not sure if it was a reaction to the vaccine or not but it got progressively worse.

I was finding going down stairs really painful. My wife and I live in a two story house, we never wanted to go down the bungalow route as we felt that keeping moving up and down stairs is a good thing. But coming down them was becoming so painful. I was having to take one at a time.

I went to see my doctor who sent me off for ultrasounds and to physio before I was eventually told I had osteoarthritis but that it was nowhere near bad enough for me to need joint replacement surgery. My doctor recommended I start taking ibuprofen tablets. In hindsight that was the worst thing I could have done because I ended up with a stomach bleed as a result of the ibuprofen. After that I tried using local, topical things like Voltarol and cold gels but none of them seemed to help me at all.

As a chemist I’ve always known what drugs do: they essentially mask the problem. The thing is, understanding how a lot of these things work also makes me very sceptical to anything new or different.

A family member worked in a Lloyds Chemist and I’d mentioned that I was having knee issues to her. She remembered a product that Lloyds stocked that she’d noticed people with joint issues kept coming back for. She found out it was FlexiSEQ and said to me, “people always come back for this stuff so it must be working for them.”

Having found out it was drug-free I was sceptical about it, but at the same time I thought “well if I don’t try it I won’t know.” So I went out and bought some. At about the same time my son, who is a keen cricketer, injured his knee and found a physio he really liked so I went to him a couple of times and he gave me some exercises to do.

It was perfect, because the exercises were helping me build muscles around the joint and the FlexiSEQ was starting to lubricate the cartilage in the joints themselves. It took a few weeks but I soon started to find that FlexiSEQ combined with exercise was really helping alleviate the pain I’d been experiencing.

I’ve been using FlexiSEQ for four years now and it’s made such a difference in my life. I’ve recommended it to people who have similar problems but so often I see on Facebook people commenting about it and they’re simply not applying it correctly. The way I do it is I paint a bit of FlexiSEQ around the joint and then let it dry. It’s a bit annoying having to sit there while it dries but I’ve incorporated it into my life, so while it dries I do things on my iPad. It’s never time wasted!

These days stairs rarely cause me issues, because I’ve found exercise and FlexiSEQ to keep my knee pain at bay, which is a huge relief.