Nutrients and Lifestyle for Pain

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.

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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

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Time for Action to Help Relieve Pain

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