Tag Archives: pain relief

Nutrients and Lifestyle for Pain

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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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Deeper Sleep, Reduced Pain, Better Daytime Performance

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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

Pain Reduction

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Pain crawls slowly over us as a wet blanket covered in fine grains of sand or slams us instantly into a knurled lump of screaming anxiety.  Looking for relief leads us down paths that would not be otherwise chosen.  Stumbling in excruciating pain leads to emotional anchors and then into a sad lightless black darkness.  And through this you decide whether you whether to chose misery or embrace an outlook of hope.  Love, joy, and peace seem to have left the station for other destinations, but always remember this is your goal.

I am no stranger to pain having suffered chronic pain for three decades.  And then, vitamin D!  It seems odd, something as simple as the sun gives us so much relief.  I was caught up in a world of misinformation after having a heat stroke from exposure to the sun when I was three.  The heat stroke almost killed me.  The remedy of staying out of the sun would have killed if not for having walked through the door of societal dilemmas. Art called science being driving down the road of motivated institutional immorality left me in a sad darkness.

Vitamin D is hugely significant in helping to deal with all kinds of pain, in particular chronic pain.  When you add to that the remedy of sulfur and magnesium, pain runs from your body like a scalded hound that was caught in the chicken house. Long have mud baths, mineral spring water, garlic, onions, and Epson salt soaks all have in common sulfur and magnesium and analgesic properties.  The vitamin D controls the action of these minerals throughout the body.  From the start of taking vitamin D, I was off of pain meds in about ten months.  That is serious meds as in the form of 400 mg of tramadol(Ultram) along with 1600 mg of gabapentin(Neurontin).  And now, seven years later with no meds there is only love, peace, and joy.

I like what Henry Lahore, Vitamindwiki, has to say about his understanding of vitamin D.

Note about pain and vitamin D from Henry Lahore

I emailed the following to a friend on our shared 66th birthday, March 2012
Ah, I am 66 years old now but feel like I am in my early 50’s (taking 12,000 IU vitamin D daily in the winter) Lots of vitamin D in the past 2 years

  • All aches and pains are gone.
  • My psoriasis on my knee is gone
  • My feet no longer develop cracked the skin
  • Essential tremor in my hands is gone
  • My neck is no longer sore
  • My back is no longer sore
  • My brain is back (able to think and remember much better)
  • The Raynaud’s pain in my fingers is gone
  • It is a great decade   As (not just my day)
  • My wife feels 10 years younger too (she is taking 10,000 IU daily)

Take some time and go to Vitamindwiki’s page on pain.   You will find way too much information there to consume.  I would suggest Vitamin D for chronic pain -2008.pdf about half way down the page: “Vitamin D – A Neglected ‘Analgesic’ for Musculoskeletal Pain”, Hollis, et.al. 

You may not be able to do anything about your pain, but you do get to decide if you want misery as well.  – Pandemic Survivor