Category Archives: Pain

The Leading Cause of Death—Pain

Posted on by
Reply

painR1It’s 3 AM and your body aches in relentless agony.  You’ve already had twelve hundred milligrams of ibuprofen and the pain continues.  Hot baths, cold baths, and nothing seems to give you relief.  The emotional pain begins as you realize that you will not be able to work and your family needs your income to survive.  As emotional pain and physical pain dance around your central nervous system, despair becomes your state of being.  The remedy is not prescription pain meds or street drugs.

Recent headlines screamed that the leading cause of death for persons under fifty is pain med abuse.  Having lived with pain since the late 1970s before overcoming it in the 2000s, I would say the leading cause of all death is PAIN.  Is it that opiates are being abused, or is it that there is so much pain that humans will do almost anything to relieve themselves of pain?  The signal that your body needs repair becomes worse than the underlying condition. As the pain continues the natural response of our body is to start shrinking the brain and other neural tissue. As the quality of life fails, emotional turmoil leads us into a state where death seems to be better than life.  Why have we come to this stage of pain?  Pain is the number one ailment in the US with 100 million people in some form of pain.

The cause of pain in the US has been the result of trying to maintain the largest segment of the economy as the medical industry.  To accomplish this feat, it has been necessary to manipulate society in many different areas. 

  • The food supply has been changed so that there are many artificial chemicals that our bodies cannot handle. How food is processed is another abuse to our food supply that the body does not respond well to. This prevents our bodies from achieving the normal healing processes provided by food. When we don’t heal, chronic pain is the result.
  • We have been scared from the sun for over the last fifty years.  Vitamin D will damage your body and UV radiation will give you cancer.  This lie has led to much of our pain.  Not only does UV light provide many beneficial compounds when proper solar exposure is maintained, but also the other side of the visible spectrum or near infrared provides many healing benefits. This includes energy to our mitochondria for cellular healing.
  • Around the beginning of the Twentieth Century, funding for universities that taught patent medicine while not funding natural healing technologies became the way of American medicine.  This led us to find drugs sourced from natural compounds. To understand this, consider the natural anti-inflammatory salicylates that were modified to make aspirin or salicylic acid. Natural compounds were modified to make drugs and our bodies do not respond well to them.  Also, treating chronic pain with drugs instead of vitamins and minerals is just stupid. Congress even went as far as to say that you cannot advertise anything that is intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease without going through the FDA’s drug process.  If you don’t drink water you will die.  According to the FDA, if you advertise that water will prevent death, it is a drug.
  •  Now as congress battles over healthcare, it is not about health, but sustaining the medical sector economy.  There is some ethics involved as failure of the economy could lead to pain.  One medical practice decided to start treating their patients with vitamins and minerals based on the huge amount of medical research.  The result for eight thousand patients was a reduction in office visits from four per patient per year to one visit per patient per year.  It does not take an accounting genius to determine that this was huge reduction in income.  Imagine the decline in the US economy if the entire population was given an adequate intake of vitamins and minerals.  With almost twenty percent of our economy in the medical sector, the US would plunge into recession.  Our congressmen are now having to balance the health of the economy with the health of the population.  What would you do?  Poor policy decision over the last century has put us into a very sad position.  If we modeled our health policies like the rest of the modernized countries, there would be a loss of over five million health insurance jobs and many medical and pharmaceutical jobs.  Congress has consistently decided in the past that the ill health of the population is better that a loss in the economy. The policies of Health and Human Services can be defined in three simple words: Markets before mandates.

In the decades of my chronic pain, I only survived, through the grace of God, by being able to read medical research papers on nutrition for health and apply the findings to my health.  Does everyone have this capability?  We have put our trust in institutions because we are told that America is the greatest country in the world.  It is a great country, but it has some very bad policies for health.  I have a friend that went into medical practice in the 1970s. He constantly complained that he had no solution for the aches and ill health of the aged.  Obviously, he had not been trained in nutritional solutions.  This is the general course of the medical practice today.

With the new development in research for mitochondrial (cellular energy) health, our understanding of how processed carbohydrates lead to poor health has increased significantly.  It seems that our ancient ancestors had a better understanding of how food heals us than our institutions of today.  If you wait until this becomes common practice of using foods for health, you most likely will be dead.  It will take many decades for our system to change. Over the last half century, we have been scared from the sun, told to use fats that were not healthy, substituted sugar for fats, and continued the use of drugs instead of vitamins and minerals.   

To begin our journey of recovery, please consider eliminating flour from grains and all processed sugar that includes high fructose corn syrup.  Find a source from someone that has studied this for decades.  I have found Dr. Mercola to a have a firm grasp of nutrition for health.  His new book, Fat for Fuel, is very enlightening.  You may also want to subscribe to his daily newsletter. Don’t be alarmed as it is very complicated because of the constant barrage of bad information from our institutions. The Whole30 diet plan may be a good place for you to start. Here are the Whole30 rules. Here is what to expect in the first thirty days as you recover from processed foods. There are many other sources for diet like the paleo diet. Pick one and embrace it for your health.  –Pandemic Survivor

Healing with Infrared Light

Posted on by
Reply

SunI have truly been amazed at the healing power of infrared light. It is not that I have some special coherent light device made with the technology of LEDs. It is just a plain ole heat lamp otherwise known as a brooder lamp for raising chicks. I wrote about the use of near infrared for healing back pain. In that article, I gave you links to the science of how it works and how to use the light. I believe the major benefit is adding cellular energy (ATP) to allow the natural healing processes to take place quicker. Here are three brief stories that I have seen firsthand with use infrared.

I had sprained my right wrist very severally.  I was not able to bend my hand passed vertical to my arm.  Normally a sprain like this would take days or weeks to heal.  I exposed the hand and wrist to the infrared light for about twenty minutes.  I held it close enough that I could feel the heat but not close enough to burn. During the exposure, a bright red line developed between my hand and wrist where the tissue had torn.  There was also a red spot that developed further up my wrist that was about an inch in diameter. I assumed this was injured tissue. The next morning I was able to have full use of my hand, but the wrist was still sore. By the second day, there was no indication of injury at all or the use of my hand had returned to normal.

I regularly have coffee in the morning, after spending an hour at the gym, with the folks at McDonalds. A welder sometimes joins us before he goes out for his work day.  He came in one morning with a limp. I asked what was wrong.  He described a knee injury. His doctor told him to stay out of work for two weeks to allow it to heal.  I suggested that he try the light.  ir-light-setuprHe told me that he had lots of this type of heat lamp as sometimes he used it to preheat the metal before welding. Two days later, he came in for coffee and was very excited. He said he was going back to work. He described his knee as no pain and normal function.

A family member had hernia surgery several months ago. He did not rest after the surgery to allow the wound to properly heal. He has a significant amount of scar tissue. If he stays on his feet for any length of time, he starts having severe pain. This happen recently during a visit with him. He had come back from our event for the afternoon and retired to his easy chair with a blanket pulled over this body. I went to the local Ace Hardware store and got a 250-watt heat lamp. I was amazed at the selection of sizes–farm country. The bulb was a GE. GE has caught on to the use of the lamp. It had directions on the side of the box that said normal exposure for personal body use was 20 to 30 minutes.

He exposed the scar tissue for about twenty minutes. A couple of hours later, I noticed he was down in the floor playing with his children. I asked if his pain was better. I was amazed at his description. Now understand, he has had this pain problem for months. He described his pain as a seven before using the heat lamp. At two hours later, he described his pain as a one–amazing.

I really don’t have a clue as to how this works other than what I described in my opening. However, you can bet that I will have an infrared light for my aches, pains, and injuries.  Scaring us from the sun over the last fifty years has been a serious health error.  –Pandemic Survivor

Discovery of the Century—Healing Cartilage

Posted on by
5

Cartilage damage is the number one problem that creates pain in the aging population.  Cartilage compresses, nerves compress, and pain and chronic disease is the result. Unfortunately, it has also become a problem with the not so aged.  If you are a reader of this blog, you know of the back and nerve pain that I suffered for three decades.  I even wrote a book about the recovery, Healed from Chronic Pain.  I have been in the process of writing a second book about how to repair cartilage and felt that something was missing.  The missing environmental factor is the SUN.

health2

I started to supplement with vitamin D3 November 4, 2004.  I had shrunk an inch from degenerative disc disease over the years.  When I combined the supplements that I had researched, my cartilage repaired.  Not only did my cartilage repair, but also my health overall returned.  I had always assumed that getting vitamin D3 from whatever source was one of the keys.  That is, keeping my serum vitamin D (25(OH)D) above 60 ng/ml.  However, I noticed at times that my cartilage had not rehydrated to keep me at my new height.  During the year of recovery, I had grown back to my original height in the first seven months.  During the next three months, I grew to my genetic height of–-an inch and one half taller than I had ever been.

It took me several years to find one key necessary for cartilage repair.  During the year of repair, I had supplemented with methyl folate, as I had read that it crossed the blood brain barrier.  I knew that my brain had shrunk from over a decade of chronic severe pain.  I thought the methyl folate would help my brain repair.  I now realize that the methylation cycle, with methyl folate and its cofactors, were necessary to stimulate stem cell growth.  Only fifty percent of the population can convert folic acid, a manmade molecule, to folate required to drive the methylation cycle.  Thanks to Dr. Ben Lynch, I now understand how important the methylation cycle is to health because of its role in genetic expression. (Note: betaine or trimethyl glycine will allow the methylation cycle to work without folate.  The human body is so smart in usually having two pathways.  Both folate and betaine are in spinach; Popeye was so shrewd!)

The other key that I did not understand, at the time, was sulfate.  Sulfate is critical to health, and here. If you think of all the healing remedies that were about soaking in mineral baths, sulfate and magnesium ( and here) were always key factors. I supplemented with large amounts of chondroitin sulfate and glucosamine sulfate during the year of healing.  I now realize that these molecules are so large that you most likely do not absorb them.  However, I think the sulfate from the molecules is absorbed.  This is especially true if you have a higher vitamin D3 level as vitamin D controls the transport of sulfur through dermal layers.  I now use MSM as a sulfur supplement as well as eat cruciferous and allium vegetables.  Both vegetable groups are high in sulfur, especially the garlic, onions, and leeks.

The “event” happened this past fall to bring to light the last missing component that is necessary for cartilage repair and hydration.  I had oral surgery in October for a granuloma that had developed over long amount of time per the surgeon.  I had noticed an issue with the tooth that I had a root canal done in the ‘90s.  The surgeon said there was an opening in the root crest that was allowing bacteria to destroy the bone.  In any case, this prevented me from doing my normal routine of using a tanning bed in October.  By the first of November, I started to get a nerve rash on both legs.  I had experienced this before and knew that it was coming from compression of my disc.  I measured my height, and sure enough I had shrunk. I recovered my height in two times of tanning in one week.  The nerve rash disappeared and the severe itching stopped.

The three months that I grew to taller than I had ever been was during the summer.  I spent at least thirty minutes with the midday summer sun on my back.  It has now become obvious to me that the sun is critical in three ways.  The formation of vitamin D sulfate, formation of cholesterol sulfate (Dr. Stephanie Seneff and here), and improved formation of the exclusion zone (Dr. Gerald Pollack) at the cell membranes. I will not pretend to understand the biology involved, but know that this helps to hydrate and repair cartilage.

Through the grace of God in my medically untrained ways of thinking about how to reduce pain and repair cartilage, I stumbled on the significance of vitamins and minerals and environment.  Cartilage repair is complex and that is the reason that medical science has misdirected us, I hope.  I think specialization has kept us from putting it all together.  Vitamins and minerals that I was taking when my cartilage healed–-all the vitamins as supplements and mineral complexes. The source of the manufacture and the dose of the vitamins and mineral supplements is critical.  With modern processed foods, I would have to eat about 8,000 calories per day to get an adequate amount.

Critical supplements for cartilage repair: Vitamins A (used cod live oil), B (methyl folate and its cofactors), C, D3, and possibly E; magnesium, zinc, iodine, selenium, manganese, calcium, and sulfate; and environmental exposure to UV light and infrared light. Proteins from bone and skin are also critical (gelatin-simple explanation).  The dosage is key to this combination.  Too much or too little of any of these items will trip you up.  Through trial and error, I have arrived at the correct combination.  I will now begin the rewrite of my book about how to heal cartilage. I have had many people to try my formula with great success.  The ones that regularly exposed themselves to the sun were the most successful.  –Pandemic Survivor

©2017 Mark Pegram

Nutrients and Lifestyle for Pain

Posted on by
2

Your muscles ache, your joints scream in debilitation, and your head feels like it is about to explode.  What is the path to relief?  It may be a visit to your doctor and drugs.  But this is not the long term solution.  The long term solution is nutrition with an adequate amount and correct type of protein, fats, vitamins, plant enzymes, and minerals, and a change in lifestyle eliminating processed foods, sugar, flour, and toxins. It is only through faith, hope, forgiveness, and courage that this can be achieved. The tangled web of information that we now receive about health, can be very discouraging.

painR1

Pain is a symptom of an injury, chronic disease, acute disease, allergies, and many other maladies.  It can present itself as excruciating and debilitating pain or simply as an itch.  The medical profession uses a scale of one to ten to describe pain.  This is not a very effective method unless the doctor questioning you has a full history of prior pain.  For example, when I had a ruptured appendix, the pain prior to the rupture was an eight on my pain scale.  A bruised coccyx bone from a farm injury was a ten at that time.  Now, my spinal cord being compressed seventy percent in the lumbar region ranks is a ten.  My ten is unlike anything you have ever experienced because it was severe and continuous.  I suffered some form of chronic pain for three decades because of degenerative disc disease.  This now makes the ruptured appendix a four on my pain scale. 

Pain can become an enemy of health as it causes a disruption of your nervous system as well as an effect on mood and hormone production.  This is the reason that many people with chronic severe pain decide to put an end to it all.  This is not the path.  The path to health is through proper nutrition and life style. The problem with our present medical system is that they treat the pain with meds and not necessarily the disease that is the origin of the pain.  This is especially true for chronic disease.  Our food system is poor because foods that are processed are not always healthy for our body.  The most destructive are sugar, flour, and artificial sweeteners as these things totally disrupt your endocrine system. Of course there are always the many toxins that are in our foods and water supply like lead, fluoride, bromide, mercury, glyphosate, pesticides, organics from plastics, and bactericides (chlorine or chloramine) in our public water supply.  The average person consumes pounds of pesticides and of herbicides each year from our food.

The vitamins and minerals needed to reduce and prevent pain are not to be considered as one vitamin or one mineral. They work synergistically in the body to maintain homeostasis. Vitamins and minerals along with the macronutrients are the foundation of health.  Macronutrients include: water, oxygen, protein, carbohydrates, light, and fats. Our medical profession points to drugs for healing instead of nutrients first. If the effort and research that we have done over the last one hundred years had been pointed to our food system and nutrients, we would be an extremely healthy population.  The major error in our research is specialization without considering the whole body first. This specialization of one drug or a multiple of drugs for an illness leads to side effects that are very destructive to health. Recent news has stated that medical misadventure is now the number three cause of death.

When was the last time you went to a doctor about a chronic disease and he asked you about your eating habits?  Oh, he may ask you if you use tobacco or drink heavily, but that is about it. This leaves you on your own to decide if your lifestyle is causing your pain.  The doctor’s solution through government fiat is to recommend pain meds and/or other drugs.  The doctor’s hands are tied and he cannot practice medicine as an art.  The faux science has been egregious in its efforts to maintain the medical economy.  The physician can only practice medicine through drugs, radiation, and surgery as required by our medical insurance and Health and Human Services and the many departments under that umbrella. The good news is we are slowly moving toward holistic and integrative medicine.  There have been many schools that have opened in the last three decades specifically to train doctors in these methods.

It has taken me twenty years and about ten thousand hours of reading to determine what works for me.  Doctor have saved me from many acute experiences with disease and pain.  However, it is only when I started to get enough of the correct nutrients that my body healed. This is now a constant and ongoing process as I age.  What worked for me when I was fifty is now different at sixty-five. I just don’t think that the average person has the capabilities, curiosity, resources, hope, and faith to continue the effort required for health. I have been blessed with all of these.  Also the understanding that much of what you read my just lead you down the wrong path.  Our institutions have contributed to this misadventure by specialization as stated earlier, and ignoring the science that we have if it is not economically acceptable.  This science has been paid for through your tax dollars and ignored by institutions and especially governments.  It can be a hard decision to make if improved health of the population sends us into economic depression that has its own social ills like starvation. Certainly with our many think tanks, we should be able to work our way through this tangle of decisions.  However, if you are the one in pain, it just makes you disturbed that your doctors cannot make you well.

Of course death is the ultimate outcome of your life.  Death should come with only a few months of debilitation, not decades of pain and despair. See post on morbidity: Looking Good, Feeling Better We are meant to live a healthy life.  With our resources in medicine, science, and art, there is no reason that we should not have this luxury. Getting an adequate amount and correct type of proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals is a tangled web of lies that is difficult to overcome.  Don’t despair, there are resources that are available, but you have to have the will, courage, and hope to pursue them on your own. There is relief from pain–be your own researcher and depend only on those that you can trust. I am living, happy proof of a pain free life–Pandemic Survivor
©2016 Mark Pegram

Pain, Pain Meds, and Disability

Posted on by
Reply

Americans are dying from pain meds and suffering more pain because of pain meds.  We not just talking about illegal drugs like: heroin, methamphetamines, cocaine, marijuana, etc. We can add to that prescription pain meds, in particular, the opiate meds.  We can also add to that over-the-counter pain meds, NSAIDS.  Why are we using so many pain meds?  It is because of the pain created by the food we eat, the lack of nutrition, and the choices we have made in medicine.  This leads to an extremely high incidence of chronic illness and thus, PAIN.

pain

Around the beginning of the 20th Century, money was funded away from nutritional medicine and toward patent medicine.  This created a population of chronically ill.  To resolve the pain of chronic illness, the population has turned to pain meds to treat symptoms and not the actual disease.  This has created many types of social problems as well as created an economic nightmare for healthcare.  Dr. Mercola Article on how this happened.

A lot of the pain comes from deteriorated cartilage.  But the meds that are used to treat pain, prevent the repair of cartilage.  Baby boomers have taken large amounts of NSAIDS that have caused deterioration of cartilage, and the need for joint and back surgeries.

“In human studies, NSAIDs have been shown to accelerate the radiographic progression of OA of the knee and hip. For those using NSAIDs compared to the patients who do not use them, joint replacements occur earlier and more quickly and frequently. The author notes that massive NSAID use in osteoarthritic patients since their introduction over the past forty years is one of the main causes of the rapid rise in the need for hip and knee replacements, both now and in the future.” – See more at Journal of Prolotherapy.

This of course is to say nothing of the number of deaths, kidney failures, heart failures, bleeding of the stomach and gut, and liver failures from over-the-counter meds.  All caused by taken more and more meds to prevent pain.  We have the greatest medical system in the world when it comes to treating acute illness.  But with chronic pain, we fail miserably.  Add to this the use of prescription meds and illegal meds and the social and economic issues continue.  I feel your pain and experienced pain for three decades before researching to find that it was just nutritional issues.

When it comes to nutrition, it seems that we are left to our own resources to find cures.  Without the use of the internet and the many professionals that reported on the issues, I would most likely be dead.  I am only one out of ten Americans over sixty that is not on a prescription med.  Begin your research into nutritional healing.  The most of it has to do with not getting enough vitamins and minerals.

This issue cannot be resolved simply by eliminating the use of pain meds with more guidelines for doctors.  The only way that we as a society can overcome this issue is for our institutions to reach a higher level of moral standards.  By that, I mean institutions should adopt standards (yes, specifically Health and Human Services) and educate the population on the research that has already been done to relieve chronic illness and pain with nutrition.  It is not our genome that is at fault.  It is the nutritionally and emotionally stimulated epigenome that needs repair.

The Pain of Freddie Gray and Everyone

Posted on by
Reply

Was Freddie Gray into street drugs because he was suffering chronic Pain? Pain is a mysterious and yet constant companion when faced with spinal issues. All signals from the brain to the body are through the spinal cord. Failure of the support of bone and cartilage will cause an array of symptoms all over the body that may be arising from the spine.

The spine is difficult to damage unless there is already a pre-existing condition. I have had a lot of experience with spinal issues. Once when my spine was seventy percent compressed, I got a call from the radiologist to not move until he could find my surgeon. He told me that if I even sit wrong that my spine could severe. Another time after an MRI, I was told by my surgeon that I needed immediate surgery because the stenosis (blockage of the nerve canal) in my neck was so bad that all I had to do was bump my head and I would stop breathing. However, when the cartilage and bone are sound, it would take someone extremely skilled in the art of killing to cause death by neck injury. Did Freddie Gray have a pre-existing condition with his spine from a car accident or other yet to be identified issue? There is better than an eighty percent possibility.

I do believe that spinal failure is one of the issues with the use of street drugs in the US. There is over 80% of the population that are deficient in both vitamin D and magnesium. Deficiency in these to vital nutrients causes significant pain because of failure of the spine. Pain does not manifest itself in only physical outcomes. It can affect the emotions significantly as well. After three decades of chronic severe pain, I can tell you there were periods that I would have done almost anything to get out of pain. I suspect that this is also the reason for the abuse of prescription pain meds as well.

When you are deficient in vital nutrients, the cartilage and the bone both soften. Over time the bone will crack and the cartilage will significantly degrade. This causes a series of responses throughout the body that will stump even the best physician. Early in the 20th Century, most back pain was classified as created for the sole purpose of getting pain meds in younger patients. This even happened to me in the 1970s until the doctor had my spine imaged. He then wrote me a letter of apology.

Are we going to blame the failure of our institutions for not properly defining nutrients for health on the police forces on the US? Health and social policy failure being blame on the people on the frontline is totally immoral. – Pandemic Survivor

Time for Action to Help Relieve Pain

Posted on by
Reply

I started to write this blog in 2009. That was five years after I had recovered from chronic severe back pain. I had written a non-published book at that time about the experience of healing. The book was about my two back surgeries and how I avoided the advice of doctors for more surgeries. This original book was a flow out of all that I had experienced. Three decades of chronic pain, two failed surgeries, the discovery that I could heal back pain with nutrition and growing three inches taller in ten months as I healed (think about twenty plus discs expanding in height more than one tenth inch to clear all the nerve roots). I have finally gotten over my thinking that the medical profession would move forward and not allow people to continue to suffer with back pain. After all, if an engineer could figure the combination of nutrients to allow cartilage to heal, then certainly someone in medical research could do the same.

I struggled after healing that first two years with why the medical guideline changes for healing failed cartilage had not already occurred. I had met twice with my congressman about the possibility of Congressional hearings to allow the experts to speak on things they had found on nutritional deficiency and chronic disease. We had talked about a meeting with Senator Burr to see if we could make it happen. Then, I discovered Secretary Michael Levitt’s Principles for Health and Human Services. With “Markets before Mandates” five positions above “Value Life”, I knew the economy is more important to the US Government than any life of an individual or many individuals. I knew that only a grass roots effort would cause change. I was happy to see Carole Baggerly turn her anger into action with the founding GrassrootsHealth. If you did not watch her in my last post then do that now! Presentation to Direct-MS Canada.

I have finally gotten over my emotions enough to act. I took an online course in creative writing, a daunting task for an engineer. I have reduced that first two hundred page book into about one hundred fifty pages and plan to e-publish within a week or so. It is about my life of pain, the discovery of healing, the healing, social acceptance, and my struggle to understand what was happening in government and our institutions. I only tout vitamin D3 in this book, but understand that it is the combination of many nutrients that allows cartilage to heal. Also, I wanted to wait because of the possibility that I was a unique case.   But after ten years of enjoying good health, it is now time to act.

I am about seventy percent through writing a how to book on healing back pain(still working on finding a publisher). This book will include a section on how to manage pain, the nutrients required for healing, and how to work with your doctor as you use nutrients to heal. To accomplish this task, I have persuaded a couple of medical professionals to coauthor, Molly Schneider, PharmD, and Caitlin Gerrald, PA-C.  Also, my primary care physician has agreed to write a preface supporting my claims of healing. We will also have a chapter for physicians. Here we will try to describe the physiological mechanisms as we best understand them to get physicians to understand the multiple levels of DNA/RNA action and needed nutrition to support them. We will also help physicians avoid the pit falls like just supplementing vitamin D versus checking the blood serum level of 25(OH)D.  Also supplementing with vitamin D3 versus vitamin D2. We will also do the same with other nutrients that are on the market as mimics or analogs of natural supplements. I am asking several of the people that have tried the supplements to be interviewed for this book and to discuss their outcomes. Hopefully, I will be able to release this book within six months to a year.

How significant is the need for a method to heal back pain? Consider Dr. Mercola’s recent article of “How to Avoid the Number One Cause of Disability”

My doctor, after the second surgery, offered to write me a letter for seventy percent disability. I declined at the time because through faith I believed there was a solution. It turned out to be both medical, environmental, and nutritional. Everyone who has suffered with back pain should at least try the nutrients before attempting the surgery route. Dr. Mercola makes this statement in the summary: “I strongly recommend avoiding surgery until or unless you’ve exhausted other treatment options, which include chiropractic, massage, acupuncture, exercise, and most importantly, K-Laser treatment.”

I would here like to apologize to all the people in the world suffering from chronic pain for not releasing these two books earlier.  Also for not disclosing all the needed nutrients in a timely manner. Unfortunately, there is more than physical disability in suffering with chronic pain. It totally distorts your outlook and mood from decades of pain and drugs. Every time I would hear of another person dying from chronic disease from apparent nutritional deficiency, I would allow anger to raise its ugly head instead of using it for action of love, peace, and joy. Here is a video of a recent Toastmasters speech in which I describe an event with one of my neighbors.

“Pulled from the Abyss Again”

I would like to thank my wife for her help in this effort and all the pain and suffering she has had to witness without a flinch.  – Jill W. Pegram, MT(ASCP)SC

Deeper Sleep, Reduced Pain, Better Daytime Performance

Posted on by
Reply

Sleep requirements, including quality, depth, and length of sleep are extremely important to health and a normal active day.  Stress is the major detractor of sleep in its many forms.  Whether it is stress from play, work, relationships, or physical pain, a downward spiral begins when stress is not relieved.  Of course the best mental stress reduction is to pray continuously or to meditate throughout the day for brief periods.  But what about the physical stress of pain?  Is there something simple that I can take that is safe that will allow me better sleep?  An absolute yes! GELATIN!

In the industrialized world, our diet has changed so that we are consuming primarily muscle meat protein.  It turns out that approximately fifty percent of the protein in the body is contained in collagen or in the cooked form, gelatin.  There has been such a push on reduced fat for heart health that many people confuse fat with gelatin.  They separate it from the cooked meat instead of making protein rich gravy as it was done fifty years ago on the typical American table.  It was always one of my favorite things as a child to feast on the rich gravies that my mother made.  It did not make any difference what type of meat we had.  There was always gravy. White flour gravy with chicken was just the right touch to savor with conversation after Sunday diner.  Dark brown gravy that accompanied the roast beef with the evening meal on a work night was fantastic.  After the meal, sleep came on with splendid ease.  Red eye gravy that we mixed with the grits for breakfast seemed to always make the day go much easier.

You have a cold that just want go away and your mother wraps you up in nice warm blankets and prepares a hot bowl of chicken soup.  Ah, how relaxing a mother’s love and chicken soup that seem to make the cold evaporate as vapors leaving with the morning sun.  What did that chicken soup have that was never associated with health benefits?  It was of course the chicken stock collected from cooking down remains of the last meal prepared with chicken.  The stock of course was collected from the pot that cooked down skin, bones, and chicken carcass. This stock was rich in peptides, amino acids, and proteins or from shorter to longer, the building blocks necessary for health.  And let’s not overlook the fats that are a part of the rich drippings that are necessary for the formation of hormones in the body as well as many other functions.

Let’s not forget the multiple arrays of gelatin deserts and punch mixes.  Fruit gelatin was a great desert that was not filled with added sugar or artificial sweeteners.  One of my favorites was cherry gelatin made with fresh ripe red cherries in early June.  Ah, the punches were just unbelievable for special occasions.  Ginger ale mixed in equal parts with pineapple juice with a pack of lime Jello added is just unbelievably good – mmmmmahhhh!  There is much sugar in this punch, but it was only served on special occasions.

It is bedtime and you have had a terrible day.  Go find that pack of gelatin without sugar added and wet the powder out in a small amount of cold water.  After the powder is wetted and dispersed, you can then further dissolved it in hot water with a sleepy time tea or other hot drink like warm milk.  Just plain gelatin does not have much taste.  I know one person that just mixes a whole packet of gelatin or about a tablespoon full with water.  She then slugs it down just before bed and claims an extremely restful evening and much clearer thinking the next day.  It seems the right amount of gelatin for relaxation is about one teaspoon for each fifty pounds of body weight.  In the morning, you can sprinkle gelatin on your oatmeal or put it in your favorite smoothy.

Let’s not forget the ladies in the farm neighborhood where I grew up that took gelatin to relieve joint pain.  Yep, that’s right, just plain old gelatin.  Their claims were that it would make their joint pain just disappear in a matter of hours after consuming gelatin.  But then again, they also ate lots of dark leafy greens that seemed to be the other part of this formula for joint relief.

So you don’t believe me and you want to mess up my pleasant memories of childhood with messy science that most likely has been manipulated for profit?  Then you are on your own, but if you have that bent, it is some extremely interesting reading.  See further reading below.  From your laid back and relaxed, healed from back pain, and sleep apnea with great enjoyment of life from appropriate micronutrients and the love of God and others; feel your stress dissolve and your pain fly away as you go to sleep little baby – Pandemic Survivor

Gelatin from Wikipedia
Gelatin, Stress, and Longevity – Ray Peat
GABA and Glycine
Vanilloid receptor-1 (TRPV-1)-dependant activation of inhibitory neurotransmission in spinal gelatinosa neurons of mice –
TRPV1; on the road to pain relief 
The effects of glycine on subjective daytime performance in partially sleep restricted volunteers 
TRPV1 from Wikipedia

Emotional Recovery from Pain

Posted on by
1

Pain stabs you in the emotions as well as the physical body.  When suffering long periods of chronic pain, emotions are on edge at best.  At worst, you are the vilest person in the universe.  Care should be taken when suffering chronic pain to not allow your emotions to overcome you.  The anxiety, anger, and other associated emotions will make the pain worse.

What happens if you don’t collapse the motions and allow them to take over?  I think that Dr. Joe Dispenza, “What the Bleep” fame, describes it best with what he calls a shortened refractory period.  An emotional refractory period is the time it takes to free yourself of an emotion.  If you don’t shorten the refractory period for anger as an example, others may say you are in an angry mood.  If you allow the anger to continue, they will say you have a temperament.  If you continue in anger, it becomes a personality trait and you are off to anger management. 

I had my own issues after several decades of illness and chronic pain.  It took a long time, but I finally got there through prayer.  After I discovered what was happening with allopathic medicine, I became very angry.  How could an engineer figure out what supplements to take without a medical professional or dietician urging a recommended approach that would work?  I was in severe pain from degenerative disc disease and was about to die from central sleep apnea that had been improperly diagnosed as obstructive sleep apnea.  It was so bad that I would find myself holding my breath when fully awake.  Of course, the proper supplements allowed me to recover from all the diseases.  You can just imagine the negative emotions during this period that had to be overcome.

Whatever method you use, prayer or meditation, the feeling of the emotion is unavoidable.  The triggers in the environment will set it off when you least expect it. The key is to collapse the emotion as quickly as possible.  I found that when anger set off, I would first try to move into the thought of love, joy, and peace.  This typically led to forgiveness.  From there, I would allow the anger emotion to further collapse into sadness which I held for as brief a period as possible.  I would then translate the sadness into empathy and passion for all the hurting people.  This in turn would stimulate me to act.  To do more research or to write.  Obviously the writing of this blog was very helpful.  The other side of this process is to hold the positive emotions, love, joy, peace, hope, faith, and optimism, as long as possible.

This does not happen overnight, but can happen very quickly practice.  As you continue to practice, you will find your refractory period continue to shorten.  The key is to make the feeling of a negative emotion just a brief stimulus to turn into a positive emotion and action.  Do not act on negative emotions which you can see from this blog I have done many times.  This was not helpful as who wants to read an angry writer.  If you have to talk about it, do it with a professional, your minister, or a close friend.  Don’t wear out your friend.

You may want to borrow from the emerging field of neuroscience and set a trigger for positive emotions.  It may be a bell, a snap of the fingers, a closing of the eyes while turning the head slowly from side to side or moving your eyes from side to side, slowly rubbing your palms with the tips of your fingers, a word that you say softly to yourself, or any other trigger that is convenient to you.  Obviously, you don’t want to appear ridiculous when around others.  Mark Robert Waldman describes the states of being with the following hierarchy: Reality, (perceptual) instinctual, habitual, (subjective) intentional, creative, (spiritual) self-reflective, transformational.  As you release your trigger, you can go up this ladder very quickly from brief prayer/meditation to awareness or mindfulness and a new reality.

Whatever your emotion, whatever you goal, whatever your illness, seek love, joy, and peace first – Dr. Alex Lloyd.  Pray and meditate that you will be filled with truth and light. The pain is unavoidable, but don’t make yourself and everyone around you miserable.  In Spirit and truth – Pandemic Survivor

Pain Reduction with Vitamin D3

Posted on by
1

Pain is a horrible terrible monster that can take your life away both emotionally and financially from your inability to work.  It can destroy relationships and leave you desolate without friends.  My back is filled with searing pain and my friends have deserted me, David complains in Psalm 38; the NIV is the best for this understanding.  Pain is not new.  It is the result of evil in its many different forms whether physical or spiritual. 

Vitamin D3 has shown significant properties in its ability to moderate physical pain levels.  I did a post several years ago about a pharmacist that used vitamin D to reduce a patient’s pain meds by fifty percent.  I am sure we do not understand the mechanisms at work to relieve pain with vitamin D, but should we care?  The answer of course is no unless you are trying to develop an analog that you can patent and sell for large amounts of money.

It is particularly important that you supplement with magnesium when supplementing with vitamin D3 or spending time in the sun for that matter.  Your body’s biological processes tend to increase when you increase your serum level of vitamin D.  If you don’t supplement with magnesium you could see some serious side effects like heart arrhythmias and muscle cramps.  Magnesium is responsible as an ion for the production and use of over 350 enzymes in the body.

Multiple papers have been published recently from many different studies confirming the significant effect of vitamin D3 on pain.  I suspect that it works at many different levels to control pain in all states of disease.  I know it was a paper from Saudi Arabia in 2003 that really got me going on vitamin D to relieve the issues in my back.  That paper’s conclusion was that 95% of the people in the study had reduced back pain.  Yes, that’s right, ninety five percent.

Serum vitamin D or 25(OH)D normal levels have been 20ng/ml to 100ng/ml since the 1970’s at least.  The Endocrine Society suggests a minimum of 30ng/ml when treating disease.  I believe the best level is 60 to 80 ng/ml.  As different people respond differently to vitamin D, it is not how much you take, but where you maintain your serum level.  The effect most likely will not be immediate, but long term there is nothing safer or more effective for pain.

I cannot help you with your spiritual pain except to tell you to put love, peace, and joy first in all that you do and to pray often.  I suspect this will help your physical pain as well. – Pandemic Survivor