Prescriptions of powerful pain killers, such as codeine and tramadol, have doubled in the past decade – with the number of prescriptions issued rising from 12m in 2006 to 24m in 2016. NHS Digital figures show that one of the highest increases in prescriptions has been for oxycodone, which shot up from 387,591 to 1.5 million – a 206% rise – over that period.
But doctors warn that more should be done to monitor these drugs, and that they should not be given out so readily. The Faculty of Pain Medicine and Royal Pharmaceutical Society said more patients should be persuaded to try psychological means of dealing with pain, such as mindfulness, instead.
They warn that while opioids can be effective for cancer patients and for tissue damage, they do not always help the growing number of patients now taking them for long-term pain. These drugs also have side effects, such as severe constipation and dangerous sedation.
One of the main concerns is the risk of becoming addicted. Yasir Abbasi, a psychiatrist with Mersey Care NHS Trust, said: “Being dependent or addicted to prescribed painkillers can lead towards a slippery slope of illicit behaviour which can pave the way for hardcore drugs. There are not enough non- pharmacological interventions available to reduce our reliance on opioid medication.”
Share your experiences
We want to hear from our readers about this topic. Have you been given pain killers for chronic pain? Did you feel you had enough support while on these drugs? Did you become addicted? Do you think there should be more support services for those who become dependent? Tell us your stories and experiences.
Anonymous, 40 I am a spider. I reach out and all I find is the cobweb I have woven. Woven out of experiences and childhood trauma. I reach out and find I can’t get out of this sticky mess. I can’t get out of bed. Something keeps me there and every time I try there is a wall. A wall of doubt, stigma and pain.
My name is Cobweb and I have schizoaffective disorder, which is a type of schizophrenia. As soon as you read “schizo”, parallels are made with “split personality” and perhaps craziness. Only the other day I heard someone say “schizo” in a casual way. They did not mean this in a kind way – it was referring to a kind of madness or craziness that is associated, perhaps, with crime or being possessed.
I recently explained to a friend that having schizophrenia did not mean a split personality. I believe I have suffered from this condition from the age of 17 or earlier. I was diagnosed only three years ago and got the help and support I needed. When I was 17, I was admitted to a psychiatric ward and suffered a psychotic episode and other complications. As a result, I suffer from chronic pain. I have this to cope with for the rest of my life, and I do not really know what the future holds for me.
Since this episode, I have been ill off and on, however, this did not stop me from studying for a degree, an MSc and a postgraduate course. It has not stopped me from raising awareness of mental health issues in Scotland and helping others with similar conditions. Whenever I have been out of work I have always done voluntary work and been an active member of my community. I may have schizoaffective disorder, but I’m a human. I’m slightly quirky and different, but no one is the same and the world is made up of many beings who deserve their right to be here.
I was born into a broken world, and experienced some things that others may never have. However, it has made me who I am. I have experienced trauma at an early age and am now living proof that with support and resilience it is possible to live with schizoaffective disorder. There is still much to be done. I want to tell Theresa May that more needs to be done to raise awareness of mental health generally, but most specifically among young people.
Ed, 45, from Liverpool I have a diagnosis of schizophrenia, which means I am pretty much excluded from society. Doors that are open to most people are firmly closed to me. The reality of my life is isolation, poverty, fear and hopelessness. I sometimes like to express my thoughts and experiences in little cartoon strips.
Ed’s depiction of living with schizophrenia.
Lisa Heinlen, Arizona, US My son was diagnosed with schizophrenia last March, and it was pretty sad the way it all went down. My mom has paranoid schizophrenia, so I knew the signs. I was trying to get help in a hurry and the crisis unit sent out an officer to assess the situation. The officer had no idea how to deal with someone having a breakdown, and put him in handcuffs. My son was hearing voices and this made him worse. He flipped out and kicked the officer in the groin area and tried to resist, so they took him to jail, and blamed me for his behaviour.
The only thing I can hope and pray for is that officers get more training and understanding. As long as people with mental health problems have a good support system, they’re less likely to end up back in the hospital. I spent months trying to get my son on the correct medicine. It has been a hard road for us. I encourage and love my son. It’s one day at a time for us.
In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.
Dying patients are waiting up to eight hours to receive pain relief because of cuts to district nursing services during the NHS’s unprecedented budget squeeze, a new report has revealed.
Severe financial pressures on the NHS are leading to longer waits for treatment and a short-sighted and growing rationing of care that is storing up problems for the future, according to a study by the King’s Fund health thinktank.
The report quotes one unnamed manager of a hospice saying: “The district nurses working at night are not able to give effective response times; you can wait up to eight hours … for patients experiencing pain and discomfort in the last two to three days of their life, it has a massive impact. It’s a frightening time for patients.”
The King’s Fund research has found that district nursing and sexual health services are among the areas of care most affected by six years of the NHS in England receiving annual budget increases of 1.2%, far less than its historic average of 3.7% rises.
It highlights how the diminishing number of district nurses are struggling to give patients prompt high-quality care because they are increasingly overworked.
The need to balance budgets and the smaller numbers of district nurses are prompting some NHS bodies to restrict their eligibility criteria for patients seeking help, refusing it for those with serious mobility problems unless they are completely housebound.
“We heard some examples of providers attempting to limit access. This was mainly through tightening referral criteria, particularly in relation to patients being ‘housebound’. Increasingly, if patients are able to visit their general practice (even if doing so is challenging), they will not be eligible to receive care from district nurses,” the report states.
The past two years have seen a loss of one in seven (14.8%) district nursing posts. “There is a significant gap between demand for district nursing and the available resources in terms of funding and staff numbers,” researchers found. Heavier workloads are contributing to 20% vacancy rates in some places.
The report also warns: “Pressures in district nursing are affecting the quality of patient care. Staff are increasingly rushed. Visits have become more task-focused, and there is less opportunity for thorough assessments. This dilution of quality may damage patient experience and outcomes.”
Many services provided by acute hospitals have been “relatively protected” despite the lack of investment in the NHS in recent years, the authors say.
However, genito-urinary medicine services have been hard hit, with cuts of up to 20% in 2014/15-2015/16 in some places in the budgets for testing for and treatment of sexually transmitted infections. “This has resulted in fewer clinics and reductions in staff in some areas, while there have also been cuts to prevention and outreach services. This could put patients and the general population at greater risk of infection,” the report adds.
The number of hip replacements has also started to fall, despite growing demand for them caused by the ageing population. Slightly fewer were carried out in 2015-16 than the year before as NHS clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) sought to save money by making surgery conditional on losing weight or giving up smoking. Waiting times for the procedure have also lengthened and more patients are waiting longer than the supposed maximum 18 weeks.
“It’s a disgrace that as a result of the Tory funding squeeze many elderly people are forced to live in prolonged agony and without independence because they are denied a hip replacement in reasonable time,” said Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary.
“Patients are unfairly suffering the consequences of a deliberately underfunded NHS at breaking point,” said Dr Mark Porter, chair of council at the British Medical Association.
The King’s Fund warns that rationing of care will become ever more common. “Although NHS funding growth began to slow in 2010/11, it appears to have taken some time for financial constraints to impact on patient care, and our data suggests that these impacts will spread and intensify,” the report adds.
The Department of Health has told CCGs not to ration care, despite the tight financial constraints it has imposed. NHS England said only: “Ultimately these are legally decisions for CCGs, but informed by best evidence and national guidance where appropriate.”
Low back and neck pain is an increasingly widespread and expensive condition worldwide, costing the US alone $ 88bn a year – the third highest bill for any health condition – despite evidence most treatments do not work.
Millions of people worldwide suffer from low back and neck pain, most of it unexplained, although some professionals think it may be worsened by sitting at desks all day, carrying bags and general bad posture. Episodes of acute pain are very common, but experts say that medical investigations only make things worse and the best cure is often to take painkillers, exercise gently and wait for the pain to pass.
The rising bill for treatment in the US has been uncovered in a new study by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, which looked at public and private spending on all diseases in 2013. Diabetes was in first place on $ 101.4bn and heart disease was second with $ 88.1bn. But neck and lower back pain treatment costs were close behind, at $ 87.6bn. The team split cancer into 29 separate conditions, which meant that none of them made the top 20, although combined the costs of treatment came to $ 115bn.
The most remarkable thing, said Joseph Dieleman, lead author of the paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, was the increase in treatment costs for lower back and neck pain, running at 6.5% a year against 3.5% overall. “In absolute terms, there was an increase from $ 30bn in 1996 to $ 88bn in 2013,” he told the Guardian.
The numbers of people suffering low back and neck pain in the US had not changed much, he said, but the spending had soared. Three things were driving the rise, said Dielman: individuals with pain going more often to outpatients’ clinics, increases in the costs and quantity of treatments given to people admitted to hospital, and a larger older population.
Surprised by what they found, Dieleman and his colleagues now plan to do similar work looking at the costs of treatment of low back and neck pain and other diseases in England, Norway and Switzerland.
What they already know is that low back and neck pain is a huge worldwide problem. The latest Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study, also produced by the IHME and published by the Lancet, showed it was “the leading global cause of disability in 2015 in most countries”. In the UK, a third of all long-term sickness absence from work, and nearly a fifth of any sick leave, is caused by musculoskeletal disorders, which is mostly lower back and neck pain, according to the Work Foundation.
“It’s about 30% of GP consultations,” said Karen Steadman, health, wellbeing and work lead at the foundation. A lot of patients have other health complaints at the same time – so-called co-morbidities. “About a third have co-morbid depression,” she said.
Dr Andrea Furlan, a co-ordinating editor of Cochrane Back and Neck – one of the collaborating groups of scientists who assess the worldwide evidence for which treatments work – said back or neck pain affect maybe eight out of 10 people at some point. “Almost everybody in the world will have some kind of back pain in their life,” she said.
Acute lower back or neck pain, which can last for a few days up to a couple of months, can be extremely debilitating, she said. Furlan knows this, as quite apart from being based at the Institute for Work and Health in Toronto, Canada, she has experienced it herself. “It was so painful I had to lie on the floor,” she said. “I was sure I had ruptured a disc or ligament.”
But she also knew she should not get it investigated. “The first thing you have to remember is don’t x-ray, don’t MRI and don’t CT scan – no investigation. I was desperate to have one
“Thank goodness I didn’t [get it investigated] because that’s where things go wrong. I’m 47 years old. When you do an investigation, there is a chance you are going to find something wrong in the spine. Then somebody will want to intervene.”
Injections, electrical nerve stimulation, opioid drugs and a whole host of other interventions are not recommended for lower back and neck pain. The Cochrane group have found no evidence in favour of using these or many other interventions; in the UK, guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence advises healthcare staff not to offer them.
There are people who will be “red flagged” for investigation because of their age, a fever or other issues, but most people will be advised to keep working, keep moving, keep exercising and taking painkillers and wait to get better. “Rest for acute back pain is the worst thing you can do,” said Furlan. After three weeks, her own pain was gone.
It is important to try to prevent acute pain from becoming chronic pain – the sort that does not permanently go away. Treatment can make things worse, but there is also a mental health element to much chronic pain. Those at risk of developing chronic pain are “yellow flagged”, said Furlan, and risk factors include depression and a lack of social or workplace support. Those with chronic pain will need interventions, which may include professional physiotherapy but also relaxation exercises, meditation and mindfulness.
The epidemic of lower back and neck pain is not surprising, said Furlan. “The spine is a part of the body that is so fragile. People have no idea,” she said. “It is unbelievable what the spine does.” It is also supporting increased weight and changed posture in the many people who have become obese in recent years – plus carrying heavy bags around and tension in neck muscles as people work at computers does not help.
Ending the epidemic, however, is going to be hard.
As a part of the body’s immune response, inflammation can damage your body when it’s out of control, then you may have several health problems such as obesity, heart disease, arthritis, fatigue and even cancer. That’s why it’s necessary to reduce inflammation to reduce the pain and the risk of other illnesses.
Here are some foods with strong anti-inflammatory properties to help you block inflammation and reduce pain:
1.Fatty fish
Studies found that consuming fish high in omega-3 fatty acids may relieve back pain. Eat fish high in omega-3 fatty acids and low in mercury 2 times a week to reap the benefits, such as salmon, sardines, and herring.
2.Almonds
A small handful of almonds every day may lower the risk of cardiovascular disease, according to studies. They are also a good source of monounsaturated fats and vitamins, so eat some regularly even they’re not so low in calories.
3.Olive oil
Just like almonds, olive oil is also rich in monounsaturated fats, which are good for your blood vessels. Olive oil improves health in many ways, including reducing inflammation, reducing bad cholesterol levels and preventing cancer.
4.Beets
Beets are rich in betalains, that has strong anti-inflammatory properties to battle inflammation-related diseases. Eat beets often can prevent obesity, heart disease, and even cancer.
5.Turmeric
Turmeric helps cure achy joints and arthritis due to the compound curcumin, which has good anti-inflammatory properties. It’s easy to add turmeric into your diet, while keeping in mind of that it has low bioavailability, so increase the bioavailability of turmeric in your body is also important.
6.Ginger
This spice is well known for its anti-inflammatory properties, it can relieve migraines, joint pain, arthritis and muscle aches effectively.
Know more about this spicy root: Ginger: An Amazing Spice That Promotes Healthy Life
Also take care don’t over-use it: Ginger is Healthy, But… Who Should Avoid This Spice
7.Garlic
Diallyl sulfide (DAS) and thiacremonone in garlic have anti-arthritic properties, it has also been proven to improve other inflammatory conditions.
8.Peppermint
Botanist James A. Duke, PhD, author of The Green Pharmacy Guide to Healing Foods, said that we could call peppermint as herbal aspirin, as the menthol in peppermint can help relieve muscle spasms and headaches.
More Natural Anti-inflammatory Foods to Prevent the Inflammation-related Chronic Diseases
Cinnamon
Rosemary
Goji berries
Papaya
Cruciferous vegetables
Spinach
Sweet potatoes
Cherries
Cranberries
Apples
Oranges
Kiwifruit
Rhubarb
Lemon
Limes
Avocados
Guavas
Bell peppers
Kale
Bok Choy
Salads
Chards
Green beans
Fennel bulb
Spring onions
Leeks
Cod
Tuna
Pineapple
Strawberries
Mulberries
Raspberries
Herring
Trout
Striped Bass
Oregano
Licorice
Walnuts
Halibut
Whitefish
Sardines
Blueberries
Snapper Fish
Oysters
Basil
Cloves
Thyme
Chili pepper
Parsley
Linseed
Hazelnuts
Sunflower seeds
Additional Sources: naturalantiinflammatory.org/
Related Reading:
Smart steps to increase the bioavailability of turmeric in your body
Widely used anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen have little more benefit than a placebo when it comes to treating back pain, a comprehensive review has found.
Researchers analysed 35 peer-reviewed trials on the use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs [NSAIDs] such as ibuprofen for back pain, reviewing data from 6,065 patients.
They found that none of the analgesics offered anything more than a mild relief for back-pain sufferers, and the effect was too small to be considered clinically important.
The comprehensive review, published in the journal Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, found while the drugs offered little to no benefit, patients taking them were 2.5 times more likely to suffer from gastrointestinal problems such a stomach ulcers and bleeding.
Lead author of the paper, Associate Professor Manuela Ferreira from the George Institute for Global Health in Australia, said back pain was the leading cause of disability worldwide and was commonly managed by prescribing anti-inflammatories.
But guidelines should be updated to reflect the drugs had little benefit, she said.
“These drugs are effective for other conditions but for people with back pain, we believe there is a bigger role for other treatments,” she said.
“We are not arguing that no pain relief should be used, but people using these types should be aware the benefits are small and that their side effects can be harmful, and that discussing with their doctors the benefit of other treatments including exercise may be worthwhile.”
Professor Chris Del Mar, an evidence-based medicine specialist and professor of public health at Bond University in Queensland, Australia, said both doctors and patients tended to believe medicines for back pain were more effective than the evidence shows.
“It’s hard for doctors to say to people, ‘I don’t have anything that will make much of a difference to your back pain, so grit your teeth and bear it’,” he said.
“People want to hear, ‘I’ll give you some pills and we’ll make you feel better’, so it’s a cognitive bias. The traditional view has been ‘don’t just stand there, do something’,’ but what I teach medical students is that sometimes the correct response is ‘don’t just do something, stand there’.”
He said 99.9% of acute back pain resolved itself. But he sympathised that when people were in acute pain that affected their life they just wanted something to fix it.
“That’s one of the reasons we tend to use treatments, even when they’re not effective,” he said.
Increased night time joint pain is more than just a cruel joke that nature plays on us, although it often feels that way. Your pain is keeping you awake and you have a full day ahead of you. The more you try to sleep the more frustrated you become. It’s going to be a hard morning. If only you could find a solution and get some sleep.
Part of the irony of your painful night is that it is often brought on by adrenal exhaustion. You are literally so tired that your body begins to break down, particularly in your joints. Adrenal exhaustion, however isn’t the same as doing a half day of yard work, it is exhaustion brought on by stress. And when you are stressed your adrenal glands release cortisol, leading to more insomnia. Your adrenal glands are also part of your body’s natural anti-inflammatory response, leading to increased inflammation (and pain) in your already painful joints.
When chronic night time joint pain robs you of your sleep, it affects your mood and your brain’s ability to deal with pain. Hitting the sheets at night isn’t a welcome respite to your day but instead another chore you need to do well. It seems ridiculous to have performance anxiety when it comes to getting enough sleep but that’s exactly what happens when joint pain robs you of sleep’s regenerative potential.
Enough of the “why,” here is what you can do about that night time joint pain
The above is just a few pieces of the pain puzzle. However, if you think your situation is ironic, wait until you hear the solution.
Step one to reducing your joint pain at night is to get more quality sleep. (Thanks)
There are however, some steps you should right now to take to make this more possible.
If you are falling into the same uncomfortable bed that you failed to make this morning you are probably setting yourself up for another sleepless night. Make sure you have comfortable sheets and pillows. Also make sure your room is the right temperature. Find the right position to get your best sleep. For most people that would be sleeping on your side. Sleeping on your back is usually not a good idea.
Sleep is also much more than being unconscious. Your various sleep cycles determine how rested you will feel in the morning. If you spend your entire night in stage 1 non-REM sleep, you will face the morning feeling like you just ran a marathon. You will be sore and still stressed. Experts all agree, 25% or more REM sleep per night is critical to reaping the benefits of restorative sleep.
Drugs aren’t the best answer
The problem with medicating your pain is that most drugs and especially alcohol affect your body’s ability to achieve REM. Yet the pain is keeping you from getting sleep in the first place. Medications can be very tempting, especially if the pain is severe but they don’t make a good long-term solution. That vicious circle at this point is becoming downright brutal unless you can find a solution.
In my practice, helping patients deal with night time joint pain and sleepless nights is one of the most important things I do. To put it mildly, I find that a pain-free restful sleep is one of the best medicines available. Helping my patients achieve this “Nirvana” without drugs makes all the difference in their lives.
There are actually many solutions to your pain and sleepless nights that don’t involve medications. Anti-inflammatory foods can give you the relief you never thought possible and still help you get a good night’s sleep. Many alternative treatments such as Chiropractic care, hypnotherapy, bio feedback, yoga, and even acupuncture can help your body deal with pain without negatively affecting your ability to get the sleep you need.
But, if you really want to get immediate relief from night time joint pains for less than a $ 1.00 a day, you should check this out https://betterthandrugs.co/pain-relief.
Gelatin, this common ingredient in your kitchen has been shown to help your body function well in many ways. And one of the most remarkable benefits of it is that gelatin helps reduce inflammation and pain related to arthritis. Especially when you’re suffering from leg, back, and joint pain, plain gelatin helps!
Lots of studies show that gelatin helps relieve the joint pain, and it has been added to formulas to treat arthritis and joint pain. Many people said they even got immediate relief from the pain after taking such formulas. Why? This article from a Ph.D. in Biology/Endocrinology gives you answer:
“For a long time, gelatin’s therapeutic effect in arthritis was assumed to result from its use in repairing the cartilage or other connective tissues around joints, simply because those tissues contain so much collagen. (Marketers suggest that eating cartilage or gelatin will build cartilage or other collagenous tissue.) Some of the consumed gelatin does get incorporated into the joint cartilage, but that is a slow process, and the relief of pain and inflammation is likely to be almost immediate, resembling the anti-inflammatory effect of cortisol or aspirin.”
What’s more, use gelatin as a remedy for joint pain is entirely natural and without any side effects.
Gelatin Remedy For Joint Pain
Ingredients:
5-grams gelatin powder
One-quarter cup of cold water
1/4 teaspoon turmeric powder (optional)
Directions:
Add the gelatin powder into cold water, stir it well and leave it for a whole night.
Put it in the fridge, and it should turn into jelly in the next morning.
Stir in the turmeric powder and drink it in the morning on an empty stomach.
Keep taking the drink, and you will see the result after a week.
The turmeric adds additional anti-inflammatory properties of this drink, you can also use cayenne pepper instead. Gelatin has many health benefits and uses too, so consume it in a regular way.
More Uses and Benefits of Gelatin
Helps build muscle thanks to its specific amino acids;
Provides dietary collagen;
Improves digestion;
Good for your skin, it’s commonly used in facial masks to help tighten loosen skin;
One night in May, my wife sat up in bed and said, “I’ve got this awful pain just here.” She prodded her abdomen and made a face. “It feels like something’s really wrong.” Woozily noting that it was 2am, I asked what kind of pain it was. “Like something’s biting into me and won’t stop,” she said.
“Hold on,” I said blearily, “help is at hand.” I brought her a couple of ibuprofen with some water, which she downed, clutching my hand and waiting for the ache to subside.
An hour later, she was sitting up in bed again, in real distress. “It’s worse now,” she said, “really nasty. Can you phone the doctor?” Miraculously, the family doctor answered the phone at 3am, listened to her recital of symptoms and concluded, “It might be your appendix. Have you had yours taken out?” No, she hadn’t. “It could be appendicitis,” he surmised, “but if it was dangerous you’d be in much worse pain than you’re in. Go to the hospital in the morning, but for now, take some paracetamol and try to sleep.”
Barely half an hour later, the balloon went up. She was awakened for the third time, but now with a pain so savage and uncontainable it made her howl. The time for murmured assurances and spousal procrastination was over. I rang a local minicab, struggled into my clothes, bundled her into a dressing gown, and we sped to St Mary’s Paddington at just before 4am.
The flurry of action made the pain subside, if only through distraction, and we sat for hours while doctors brought forms to be filled, took her blood pressure and ran tests. A registrar poked a needle into my wife’s wrist and said, “Does that hurt? Does that? How about that?” before concluding: “Impressive. You have a very high pain threshold.”
The pain was from pancreatitis, brought on by rogue gallstones that had escaped from her gall bladder and made their way, like fleeing convicts, to a refuge in her pancreas, causing agony. She was given a course of antibiotics and, a month later, had an operation to remove her gall bladder.
“It’s keyhole surgery,” said the surgeon breezily, “so you’ll be back to normal very soon. Some people feel well enough to take the bus home after the operation.” His optimism was misplaced. My wife came home the following day filled with painkillers. When they wore off, she writhed with suffering. After three days she rang the specialist, only to be told: “It’s not the operation that’s causing discomfort – it’s the air that was pumped inside you to separate the organs before surgery.” Once the operation had proved a success, the surgeons had apparently lost interest in the fallout.
During that period of convalescence, as I watched her grimace and clench her teeth and let slip little cries of anguish until a long regimen of combined ibuprofen and codeine finally conquered the pain, several questions came into my head. Chief among them was: “Can anyone in the medical profession talk about pain with any authority?” From the family doctor to the surgeon, their remarks and suggestions seemed tentative, generalised, unknowing – and potentially dangerous: Was it right for the doctor to tell my wife that her level of pain didn’t sound like appendicitis when the doctor didn’t know whether she had a high or low pain threshold? Should he have advised her to stay in bed and risk her appendix exploding into peritonitis? How could surgeons predict that patients would feel only “discomfort” after such an operation when she felt agony – an agony that was aggravated by fear that the operation had been a failure?
I also wondered if there were any agreed words that would help a doctor understand the pain felt by a patient. I thought of my father, a GP in the 1960s with an NHS practice in south London, who used to marvel at the colourful pain symptoms he heard: “It’s like I’ve been attacked with a stapler”; “Like having rabbits running up and down my spine”; “It’s like someone’s opened a cocktail umbrella in my penis …” Few of them, he told me, corresponded to the symptoms listed in a medical textbook. So how should he proceed? By guesswork and aspirin?
There seemed to be a chasm of understanding in human discussions of pain. I wanted to find out how the medical profession apprehends pain – the language it uses for something that’s invisible to the naked eye, that can’t be measured except by asking for the sufferer’s subjective description, and that can be treated only by the use of opium derivatives that go back to the middle ages.
When investigating pain, the basic procedure for clinics everywhere is to give a patient the McGill pain questionnaire. Developed in the 1970s by two scientists, Dr Ronald Melzack and Dr Warren Torgerson, both of McGill University in Montreal, it is still the main tool for measuring pain in clinics worldwide.
Melzack and his colleague Dr Patrick Wall of St Thomas’ Hospital in London had already galvanised the field of pain research in 1965 with their seminal “gate control theory”, a ground-breaking explanation of how psychology can affect the body’s perception of pain. In 1984, the pair went on to write Wall and Melzack’s Textbook of Pain, the most comprehensive reference work in pain medicine. It has gone through five editions and is currently more than 1,000 pages long.
In the early 1970s, Melzack began to list the words patients used to describe their pain and classified them into three categories: sensory (which included heat, pressure, “throbbing” or “pounding” sensations), affective (which related to emotional effects, such as “tiring”, “sickening”, “gruelling” or “frightful”) and lastly evaluative (evocative of an experience – from “annoying” and “troublesome” to “horrible”, “unbearable” and “excruciating”).
You don’t have to be a linguistic genius to see there are shortcomings in this range of terms. For one thing, some words in the affective and evaluative categories seem interchangeable – there’s no difference between “frightful” in the former and “horrible” in the latter, or between “tiring” and “annoying” – and all the words share an unfortunate quality of sounding like a duchess complaining about a ball that didn’t meet her standards.
But Melzack’s grid of suffering formed the basis of what became the McGill pain questionnaire. The patient listens as a list of “pain descriptors” is read out and has to say whether each word describes their pain – and, if so, to rate the intensity of the feeling. The clinicians then look at the questionnaire and put check marks in the appropriate places. This gives the clinician a number, or a percentage figure, to work with in assessing, later, whether a treatment has brought the patient’s pain down (or up).
Some men may find it hard to imagine anything more agonising than toothache or a tennis injury
A more recent variant is the National Initiative on Pain Control’s pain quality assessment scale (PQAS), in which patients are asked to indicate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how “intense” – or “sharp”, “hot”, “dull”, “cold”, “sensitive”, “tender”, “itchy”, etc – their pain has been over the past week.
The trouble with this approach is the imprecision of that scale of 1 to 10, where a 10 would be “the most intense pain sensation imaginable”. How does a patient “imagine” the worst pain ever and give their own pain a number? Some men may find it hard to imagine anything more agonising than toothache or a tennis injury. Women who have experienced childbirth may, after that experience, rate everything else as a 3 or 4.
I asked some friends what they thought the worst physical pain might be. Inevitably, they just described nasty things that had happened to them. One man nominated gout. He recalled lying on a sofa, with his gouty foot resting on a pillow, when a visiting aunt passed by; the chiffon scarf she was wearing slipped from her neck and lightly touched his foot. It was “unbearable agony”.
A brother-in-law nominated post-root-canal toothache – unlike muscular or back pain, he said, it couldn’t be alleviated by shifting your posture. It was “relentless”. A male friend confided that a haemorrhoidectomy had left him with irritable bowel syndrome, in which a daily spasm made him feel “as if somebody had shoved a stirrup pump up my arse and was pumping furiously”. The pain was, he said, “boundless, as if it wouldn’t stop until I exploded”. A woman friend recalled the moment the hem of her husband’s trouser leg snagged on her big toe, ripping the nail clean off. She used a musical analogy to explain the effect: “I’d been through childbirth, I’d broken my leg – and I recalled them both as low moaning noises, like cellos; the ripped-off nail was excruciating, a great, high, deafening shriek of psychopathic violins, like nothing I’d heard – or felt – before.”
It seems a shame that these eloquent descriptions are reduced by the McGill questionnaire to words like “throbbing” or “sharp”, but its function is simply to give pain a number – a number that will, with luck, be decreased after treatment, when the patient is reassessed.
This procedure doesn’t impress Professor Stephen McMahon of the London Pain Consortium, an organisation formed in 2002 to promote internationally competitive research into pain. “There are lots of problems that come with trying to measure pain,” he says. “I think the obsession with numbers is an oversimplification. Pain is not unidimensional. It doesn’t just come with scale – a lot or a little – it comes with other baggage: how threatening it is, how emotionally disturbing, how it affects your ability to concentrate. The measuring obsession probably comes from the regulators who think that, to understand drugs, you have to show efficacy. And the American Food and Drug Administration don’t like quality-of-life assessments; they like hard numbers. So we’re thrown back on giving it a number and scoring it. It’s a bit of a wasted exercise because it’s only one dimension of pain that we’re capturing.”
Illustration: Matthew Richardson
Pain can be either acute or chronic, and the words do not (as some people think) mean “bad” and “very bad”. “Acute” pain means a temporary or one-off feeling of discomfort, which is usually treated with drugs; “chronic” pain persists over time and has to be lived with as a malevolent everyday companion. But because patients build up a resistance to drugs, other forms of treatment must be found for it.
The Pain Management and Neuromodulation Centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital in central London is the biggest pain centre in Europe. Heading the team there is Dr Adnan Al-Kaisy, who studied medicine at the University of Basrah, Iraq, and later worked in anaesthetics at specialist centres in England, the US and Canada.
“I’d say that 55 to 60% of our patients suffer from lower back pain,” he says. “The reason is, simply, that we don’t pay attention to the demands life makes on us, the way we sit, stand, walk and so on. We sit for hours in front of a computer, with the body putting heavy pressure on small joints in the back.” Al-Kaisy reckons that in the UK the incidence of chronic lower back pain has increased substantially in the last 15 to 20 years, and that “the cost in lost working days is about £6 to 7 billion”.
Elsewhere the clinic treats those suffering from severe chronic headaches and injuries from accidents that affect the nervous system.
Do they still use the McGill questionnaire? “Unfortunately yes,” says Al-Kaisy. “It’s a subjective measurement. But pain can be magnified by a domestic argument or trouble at work, so we try to find out about the patient’s life – their sleeping patterns, their ability to walk and stand, their appetite. It’s not just the patient’s condition, it’s also their environment.”
The challenge is to transform this information into scientific data. “We’re working with Professor Raymond Lee, chair of Biomechanics at the South Bank University, to see if there can be objective measurement of a patient’s disability due to pain,” he says. “They’re trying to develop a tool, rather like an accelerometer, which will give an accurate impression of how active or disabled they are, and tell us the cause of their pain from the way they sit or stand. We’re really keen to get away from just asking the patient how bad their pain is.”
Some patients arrive with pains that are far worse than backache and require special treatment. Al-Kaisy describes one patient – let us call him Carter – who suffered from a terrible condition called ilioinguinal neuralgia, a disorder that produces a severe burning and stabbing pain in the groin. “He’d had an operation in the testicular area, and the inguinal nerve had been cut. The pain was excruciating: when he came to us, he was on four or five different medications, opiates with very high dosages, anticonvulsive medication, opioid patches, paracetamol and ibuprofen on top of that. His life was turned upside down, his job was on the line.” The utterly stricken Carter was to become one of Al-Kaisy’s big successes.
Since 2010, Guy’s and St Thomas’ has offered a residential programme for adults whose chronic pain hasn’t responded to treatment at other clinics. The patients come in for four weeks, away from their normal environment, and are seen by a motley crew of psychologists, physiotherapists, occupational health specialists and nursing physicians who between them devise a programme to teach them strategies for managing their pain.
Many of these strategies come under the heading of “neuromodulation”, a term you hear a lot in pain management circles. In simple terms, it means distracting the brain from constantly brooding on the pain signals it is getting from the body’s periphery. Sometimes the distraction is a cunningly deployed electric shock.
“We were the first centre in the world to pioneer spinal cord stimulation,” says Al-Kaisy. “In pain occasions, overactive nerves send impulses from the periphery to the spinal cord and from there to the brain, which starts to register pain. We try to send small bolts of electricity to the spinal cord by inserting a wire in the epidural area. It’s only one or two volts, so the patient feels just a tingling sensation over where the pain is, instead of feeling the actual pain. After two weeks, we give the patient an internal power battery with a remote control, so he can switch it on whenever he feels pain and carry on with his life. It’s essentially a pacemaker that suppresses the hyperexcitability of nerves by delivering subthreshold stimulation. The patient feels nothing except his pain going down. It’s not invasive – we usually send patients home the same day.”
When Carter, suffering from agonising pain in the groin, had failed to respond to any other treatments, Al-Kaisy tried his new combination of therapies. “We gave him something called a dorsal root ganglion stimulation. It’s like a small junction-box, placed just underneath one of the bones of the spine. It makes the spine hyperexcited, and sends impulses to the spinal cord and the brain. I pioneered a new technique to put a small wire into the ganglion, connected to an external power battery. Over 10 days the intensity of pain went down by 70% – by the patient’s own assessment. He wrote me a very nice email saying I had changed his life, that the pain had just stopped completely, and that he was coming back to normality. He said his job was saved, as was his marriage, and he wanted to go back to playing sport. I told him, ‘Take it easy. You mustn’t start climbing the Himalayas just yet.’” Al-Kaisy beams. “This is a remarkable outcome. You cannot get it from any other therapies.”
The greatest recent breakthrough in assessing pain, according to Professor Irene Tracey, head of the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, has been the understanding that chronic pain is a thing in its own right. She explains: “We always thought of it as acute pain that just goes on and on – and if chronic pain is just a continuation of acute pain, let’s fix the thing that caused the acute and the chronic should go away. That has spectacularly failed. Now we think of chronic pain as a shift to another place, with different mechanisms, such as changes in genetic expression, chemical release, neurophysiology and wiring. We’ve got all these completely new ways of thinking about chronic pain. That’s the paradigm shift in the pain field.”
Tracey has been called the “Queen of Pain” by some media commentators. She was, until recently, the Nuffield Professor of anaesthetic science and is an expert in neuroimaging techniques that explore the brain’s responses to pain. Despite her nickname, in person she is far from alarming: a bright-eyed, enthusiastic, welcoming and hectically fluent woman of 50, she talks about pain at a personal level. She has no problem defining the “ultimate pain” that scores 10 on the McGill questionnaire: “I’ve been through childbirth three times, and my 10 is a very different 10 from before I had kids. I’ve got a whole new calibration on that scale.” But how does she explain the ultimate pain to people who haven’t experienced childbirth? “I say, ‘Imagine you’ve slammed your hand in a car door – that’s 10.’”
She uses a personal example to explain the way perception and circumstance can alter the way we experience pain, as well as the phenomenon of “hedonic flipping”, which can convert pain from an unpleasant sensation into something you don’t mind. “I did the London Marathon this year. It needs a lot of training and running and your muscles ache, and next day you’re really in pain, but it’s a nice pain. I’m no masochist, but I associate the muscle pain with thoughts like, ‘I did something healthy with my body,’ ‘I’m training,’ and ‘It’s all going well.’”
I ask her why there seems to be a gap between doctors’ and patients’ apprehension of pain. “It’s very hard to understand, because the system goes wrong from the point of injury, along the nerve that’s taken the signal into the spinal cord, which sends signals to the brain, which sends signals back, and it all unravels with terrible consequential changes. So my patient may be saying, ‘I’ve got this excruciating pain here,’ and I’m trying to see where it’s coming from, and there’s a mismatch here because you can’t see any damage or any oozing blood. So we say, ‘Oh come now, you’re obviously exaggerating, it can’t be as bad as that.’ That’s wrong – it’s a cultural bias we grew up with, without realising.”
Recently, she says, there has been a breakthrough in understanding about how the brain is involved in pain. Neuroimaging, she explains, helps to connect the subjective pain with the objective perception of it. “It fills that space between what you can see and what’s being reported. We can plug that gap and explain why the patient is in pain even though you can’t see it on your x-ray or whatever. You’re helping to bring truth and validity to these poor people who are in pain but not believed.”
But you can’t simply “see” pain glowing and throbbing on the screen in front of you. “Brain imaging has taught us about the networks of the brain and how they work,” she says. “It’s not a pain-measuring device. It’s a tool that gives you fantastic insight into the anatomy, the physiology and the neurochemistry of your body and can tell us why you have pain, and where we should go in and try to fix it.”
Some of the ways in, she says, are remarkably direct and mechanical – like Al-Kaisy’s spinal cord stimulation wire. “There are now devices you can attach to your head and allow you to manipulate bits of the brain. You can wear them like bathing caps. They’re portable, ethically allowed brain-simulation devices. They’re easy for patients to use and evidence is coming, in clinical trials, that they are good for strokes and rehabilitation. There’s a parallel with the games industry, where they’re making devices you can put on your head so kids can use thought to move balls around. The games industry is, for fun, driving this idea that when you use your brain, you generate electrical activities. They’re developing the technology really fast, and we can use it in medical applications.”
Illustration: Matthew Richardson
Pain has become a huge area of medical research in the US, for a simple reason. Chronic pain affects over 100 million Americans and costs the country more than half a trillion dollars a year in lost working hours, which is why it has become a magnet for funding by big business and government.
Researchers at the Human Pain Research Laboratory at Stanford University, California, are working to gain a better understanding of individual responses to pain so that treatments can be more targeted. The laboratory has several study initiatives on the go – into migraine, fibromyalgia, facial pain and other conditions – but its largest is into back pain. It has been endowed with a $ 10m grant from the National Institutes of Health to study non-drug alternative treatments for lower back pain. The specific treatments are mindfulness, acupuncture, cognitive behavioural therapy and real-time neural feedback.
They plan to inspect the pain tolerance of 400 people over five years of study, ranging from pain-free volunteers to the most wretched chronic sufferers who have been to other specialists but found no relief. The idea is to find people’s mid-range tolerance (they’re asked to rate their pain while they are experiencing it), to establish a usable baseline. They then are given the non-invasive treatments – such as mindfulness and acupuncture – and are subjected afterwards to the same pain stimuli, to see how their pain tolerance has changed from their baseline reading. MRI scanning is used on the patients in both laboratory sessions, so that clinicians can see and draw inferences from the visible differences in blood flow to different parts of the brain.
A remarkable feature of the assessment process is that patients are also given scores for psychological states: a scale measures their level of depression, anxiety, anger, physical functioning, pain behaviour and how much pain interferes with their lives. This should allow physicians to use the information to target specific treatments. All these findings are stored in an “informatics platform” called Choir, which stands for the Collaborative Health Outcomes Information Registry. It has files on 15,000 patients, 54,000 unique clinic visits and 40,000 follow-up meetings.
The big chief at the Human Pain Research Laboratory is Dr Sean Mackey, Redlich professor of anaesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine, neurosciences and neurology at Stanford. His background is in bioengineering, and under his governance the Stanford Pain Management Center has twice been designated a centre of excellence by the American Pain Society. A tall, genial, easy-going man, he is sometimes approached by legal firms who want him to appear in court to state definitively whether their client is or is not in chronic pain (and therefore justified in claiming absentee benefit). His response is surprising.
“In 2008, I was asked by a law firm to speak in an industrial injury case in Arizona. This poor guy got hot burning asphalt sprayed on his arm at work; he had a claim of burning neuropathic pain. The plaintiff’s side brought in a cognitive scientist, who scanned his brain and said there was conclusive evidence that he had chronic pain. The defence asked me to comment, and I said, ‘That’s hogwash, we cannot use this technology for that purpose.’
“Shortly afterwards, I gave a talk on pain, neuroimaging and the law, explaining why you can’t do this – because there’s too much individual variability in pain, and the technology isn’t sensor-specific enough. But I concluded by saying, ‘If you were to do this, you’d use modern machine-learning approaches, like those used for satellite reconnaissance to determine whether a satellite is seeing a tank or a civilian truck.’ Some of my students said, ‘Can you give us some money to try this?’ I said, ‘Yes, but it can’t be done.’ But they designed the experiment – and discovered that, using brain imagery, they could predict with 80% accuracy whether someone was feeling heat pain or not.”
Mackey finally published a paper about the experiment. So did his findings influence any court decisions? “No. I get asked by attorneys, and I always say, ‘There is no place for this in the courtroom in 2016 and there won’t be in 2020. People want to push us into saying this is an objective biomarker for detecting that someone’s in pain. But the research is in carefully controlled laboratory conditions. You cannot generalise about the population as a whole. I told the attorneys, ‘This is too much of a leap.’ I don’t think there’s a lot of clinical utility in having a pain-o-meter in a court or in most clinical situations.”
Mackey explains the latest thinking about what pain actually is. “Now we understand that pain is a balance between ascending information coming from our bodies and descending inhibitory systems from our brains. We call the ascending information “nociception” – from the Latin nocere, to harm or hurt – meaning the response of the sensory nervous system to potentially harmful stimuli coming from our periphery, sending signals to the spinal cord and hitting the brain with the perception of pain. The descending systems are inhibitory, or filtering, neurons, which exist to filter out information that’s not important, to “turn down” the ascending signals of hurt. The main purpose of pain is to be the great motivator, to tell you to pay attention, to focus. When the pain lab was started, we had no way of addressing these two dynamic systems, and now we can.”
Mackey is immensely proud of his massive CHOIR database – which records people’s pain tolerance levels and how they are affected by treatment – and has made it freely available to other pain clinics as a “community source platform”, collaborating with academic medical centres nationwide “so that a rising tide elevates all boats”. But he is also humble enough to admit that science cannot tell us which are the sites of the body’s worst pains.
“Back pain is the most reported pain at 28%, but I know there’s a higher density of nerve fibres in the hands, face, genitals and feet than in other areas,” Mackey says, “and there are conditions where the sufferer has committed suicide to get away from the pain. Things like post-herpetic neuralgia, that burning nerve pain that occurs after an outbreak of shingles and is horrific; another is cluster headaches – some patients have thought about taking a drill to their heads to make it stop.”
Like Irene Tracey, Mackey is enthusiastic about the rise of transcranial magnetic stimulation (“Imagine hooking a nine-volt battery across your scalp”) but, when asked about his particular successes, he talks about simple solutions. “Early on in my career, I used to be very focused on the peripheral, the apparent site of the pain. I was doing interventions, and some people would get better but a lot wouldn’t. So I started listening to their fears and anxieties and working on those, and became very brain-focused. I noticed that if you have a nerve trapped in your knee, your whole leg could be on fire, but if you apply a local anaesthetic there, it could abolish it.
“This young woman came to me with a terrible burning sensation in her hand. It was always swollen; she couldn’t stand anyone touching it because it felt like a blowtorch.” Mackey noticed that she had a post-operative scar from prior surgery for carpal-tunnel syndrome. Speculating that this was at the root of her problem, he injected botulinum toxin, a muscle relaxant, at the site of the scar. “A week later, she came up and gave me this huge hug and said, ‘I was able to pick up my child for the first time in two years. I haven’t been able to since she was born.’ All the swelling was gone. It taught me that it’s not all about the body part, and not all about the brain. It’s about both.”
Main illustration by Matthew Richardson
This is an edited version of an article that appears on Mosaic. It is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.
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Once in a while during your life, even though you never ask for it, you have to experience pain. Pain caused by bruises, for instance, typically subside in e few hours or days as the color of the affected area fades, on the other hand, some ailments cause you to experience pain for a longer period, which lingers for several months or years.
What is pain? Pain is defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience. Two types of pain are an acute and chronic pain. The former results from disease, inflammation, or injury to tissues and comes on suddenly whereas the latter persists over a longer period of time than acute pain, e.g. three to six month, and is resistant to most medical treatments.
There are many types of pain. Common pain syndromes include back pain, arthritis, cancer pain, headaches, migraine, head and facial pain, muscle pain, neuropathic pain, sciatica, and shingles. Pain is also as a result of painful disorders of the skin, sports injuries, surgical pain, spinal stenosis, trauma, and vascular disease/injury.
Two categories
Generally, there two categories of chronic pain: nervous system and structures (neuropathic) and deep tissue and organ (nociceptive). Common symptoms of chronic pain include tingling, aching, throbbing, and burning in any part of the body.
Treatment of different types of chronic pain may vary, however, natural foods and supplements are typically effective for treating chronic pain originated from many different ailments.
Natural treatments include activated charcoal, apple cider vinegar and blackstrap molasses are particularly effective for relieving pain. Additional treatment options include undergoing acupuncture, avoiding artificial sweeteners and soaking in Epsom salt baths.
Activated Charcoal
Activated charcoal or activated carbon is commonly used to treat food poisoning. It is also can be used to flushed out toxins and chemicals, that’s why it is used in emergency trauma centers across the world for the safe and effective treatment of poisoning and drug overdoses.
Please note that activated charcoal isnot charcoal used in your barbecue grill. Activated charcoal is created through a heating process, during which water vapor is added that results in the formation of an abundance microscopic pores. An increased surface area formed by the microscopic pores can effectively trap toxins in the form of many types of chemical compounds.
Surprisingly, taken orally, activated charcoal can be used to treat pain caused by arthritis (gout and rheumatoid). It can also be used in the form of a poultice made by combining flaxseed and activated charcoal powder. It is said to be able to alleviate pain associated with cancer, sore throat, earache, irritated eyes, sprains, toothache, inflammations, and bruises. Pain will subside between ½ – 1 hour is not unusual.
Note: Sluggish detoxification, drug/chemical abuse, chemical exposure in a workplace, and long-term uses of drugs especially polypharmacy (concomitant drugs: five or more drugs used at the same time) is associated with toxic neuropathy, which can induce pain in susceptible individuals.
Apple cider vinegar
Besides acetic acid and vinegar, apple cider vinegar contains many types of beneficial chemical compounds including similar molecules found in fresh apple, some or most of which are probably in modified forms (unfortunately, no studies to substantiate). It may contain quercetin, chrologenic acid, phloridzin, and catechin, all of which are typical bioflavonoids found in apples.
These phytochemical constituents along with acetic acid as well as other biologically active chemicals such as many types of organic acids, several types of vitamin B, vitamin C, carotenoids, and mineral like magnesium is believed to work synergistically in helping flush out many types of toxins and chemicals.
In short, many people have reported anecdotal evidence of using apple cider vinegar to successfully alleviate chronic pain including digestive problems, headaches, gout, and rheumatoid arthritis.
Note: Taking 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar and 1 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil can alleviate pain much faster.
Molasses
Some people use molasses to treat health conditions such as pain associated with PMS, menstrual cramps, carpal tunnel syndrome, toothache, and ulcerative colitis. Besides bioflavonoids and carotenoids, molasses especially blackstrap molasses contains mineral including sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, iron, phosphorus, copper, manganese, and selenium.
It also contains vitamin B1, B3, B5, B6. Magnesium, calcium, vitamin B6 (synergized by other vitamin Bs) along with bioflavonoids and carotenoids are thought to be essential in managing pain caused by PMS, menstrual cramps, and carpal tunnel syndrome.
It’s a truth that there is no diet to treat arthritis, while certain foods have been proven to have ability to fight against inflammation, thus helping ease the symptoms of arthritis.
If you want to ease arthritis pain, you should aim for a diet that high in vegetables, fruits, nuts and fish. And also limit the consumption of sugar, fried foods, processed foods, dairy products, alcohol, too salty foods and corn oil, which may worsen your arthritis.
Following is a list of 40 highly recommended foods you should add to your diet to fight inflammation and ease arthritis pain in a natural way.
Ginger
Garlic
Hot Peppers
Cherries
Beets (Why and How You Should Include Beets In Your Diet)
Broccoli
Wild-caught Salmon
Blueberries
Extra-virgin Olive Oil
Green Tea
Oranges
Bok Choy
Grapefruit
Beans
Carrots
Strawberries
Celery (Healing Benefits of Celery and Natural Ways to Use it)
Brussel Sprouts
Pinapple
Turmeric
Mangos
Walnuts
Sweet Potatoes
Apples
Lentils
Peppermint
Shrimp
Spinach
Tomatoes
Almonds
Aloe Vera (26 Natural Uses of Aloe Vera For Health, Beauty and Household)
Mustard Seeds
Frankincense Oil
Myrrh
Cedarwood Oil
Licorice
Nettle
Basil Oil
Chamomile Oil
With these scientific-support anti-inflammatory foods, you can make various remedies to cure arthritis at home. Juicing your foods to create natural cures:
1. Turmeric Colorful Drink
Ingredients:
A 4-inch fresh turmeric root
2 apples
2 pears
2 peeled lemons
1 inch ginger root
3 carrots
3 stalks celery
Juice all these ingredients and pour your drink into a glass container.
2. Cool Basil Drink
Ingredients:
3 sprigs of basil
5 cups of watermelon
2 cups of blueberries
half a lime
1 dash of cayenne pepper
Clean all of the ingredients and blend them well.
3. Powerful Mint Protector
Ingredients:
20-30 fresh peppermint leaves
1 cup blueberries
2 cups kiwifruit
1 cup strawberry
Blend all of these ingredients and have this drink to fight against inflammation effectively.
4. Powerful Anti-inflammatory Juice
Ingredients:
1 inch peeled ginger root
1 lemon
2 apples
4 carrots
4 handfuls spinach
Wash all the ingredients and juice them. Enjoy your juice.
What’s more, add some drops of fish oil to these juices are suggested, as the combination of omega 3 fatty acids will strengthen the power of these juices to protect you against inflammation.
Drinking oregano tea has been a long tradition in many parts of the world as a home remedy for some different ailments. It is mostly used to heal strep throat, sinusitis, coughs. Also useful in cancer treatment, headaches, back pain, infections and more. Some have used this tea to relieve fever, diarrhea, vomiting, and jaundice. Some herbs tend to lose some of their strength and potency in the drying process. But not oregano herb! It retains it’s all round goodness very well.
Oregano tea is also rich in iron, fiber, antioxidants, manganese, omega-3 fatty acids, etc. which makes it a healthy herb. It is also an excellent source of vitamins and minerals. It is high in vitamins A, C, and E complex, as well as zinc, magnesium, calcium, potassium, copper, and niacin.
Why Drink Oregano Tea?
Regular intake of oregano tea also helps in preventing any bacterial infections by inhibiting their growth. (1)
Oregano leaves contain more than 40 different compounds and these compounds belong to phytonutrient classes called polyphenols, flavonoids, and anthocyanins, which are all recognized for their anti-cancer properties. (2)
In a study published in the International Food Journal of Sciences and Nutrition in 2007, it was shown that drinking oregano tea help in lowered LDL levels. (3)
It is an effective mouthwash for canker sores in the mouth and is an effective topical application for the treatment of acne or sores on the skin. (4)
Oregano tea can be used for relieving an asthma attack. Inhaling the vapors of oregano also helps in clearing the nasal passages. (5)
Oregano tea is a great source of fiber which helps in controlling weight, keeping the entire body fit and also decreasing the chance of numerous illnesses. (6)
Oregano tea can be used to replace anti-inflammatory medications for reversing pain and swelling. Some report it as being nearly as high a pain killer as morphine. (7)
Healthy Oregano Tea Recipe:
Ingredients:
Oregano leaves- 1 ½ tsp Water- 1 cup Honey- 1-2 tbsp (depending on the taste)
Directions:
In a saucepan, bring the water to boil. When the water starts boiling hard, turn off the flame and keep the pan aside. Add the oregano leaves and stir well. Leave for 5 minutes in the boiled water. It can burn the leaves and spoil the taste of the hot beverage). After soaking it in boiled water for 5 minutes, strain in a cup and add honey. Oregano tea recipe is very simple! You can make the herbal tea strong by adding more leaves in the water.
Lower back pain is a very common problem among adult people. It is a pain below the ribs and above the legs. This part of our body bears the most of the body’s weight. So it’s pretty easy to hurt your back when you lift a heavy stuff or do other activities. At some point most of us experience this pain and having a back pain is very irritating. There are many reasons which cause lower back pain. Here we have listed some main causes behind lower back pain:
Sprain
Overweight
Accidental injury
Herniated Disc
Arthritis(inflammation of one or more joint)
Illness
A spine problem you were born with.
Fibromyalgia (a disorder that causes fatigue and muscle pain)
Compression fractures
To get quick and effective relief from back pain, you can follow some tips mentioned over here to get rid of this irritating pain.
Sometimes back pain is serious. In such conditions, it’s obvious that you will call your doctor. But for routine and mild back pain, you can do some home remedies for quick relief.
Ice & Heat to the Rescue
In first 24-48 hours of an injury, ice is best as it reduces inflammation. Use ice for about 20 minutes on your back then take it off to give your back skin rest. If pain persists, talk to a doctor. After 48 hours you can switch to heat if you prefer. But in first 48 hours when you have acute pain, an ice pack is only recommended.
Move Your Spines
Our body is made to move, so does our spine. Keep doing your daily life activities to feel better. Go to work, make the beds, walk the pet. If you are in a state to do aerobic exercises such as bicycling, swimming and walking then carefully do them. Just don’t overdo it. You can keep your back pain in mobile by doing so.
Exercise and Stretch
Regular physical activity keeps you away from this types of pain. A simple exercise like walking, running can be proved very helpful in healing such pain. It is advisable to consult your physician for a list of exercises suitable for your age and health conditions.
Stretch: Apart from exercise, stretch helps you recover from back pain quickly. Always stretch before any physical activity or exercise to warm up yourself. Also, stretch for 10-15 minutes before going to bed. Sitting for long hours in a desk chair all day and bending forward after every other minute to see monitor or file is the reason of back pain in office goers. If you are among those people, then don’t forget to stretch your legs and do office yoga to get rid of this pain.
Massage Your Back
Heat some sesame oil or coconut oil on a low flame with eight cloves of garlic in it. Apply the mixture on the affected area and massage it thoroughly for at least 10-15 minutes. Leave it for 3-4 hours then wash it off with warm water or if you wish you can take a bath of warm water.
If you do not want to do so much effort, then mix some camphor in your massage oil and apply it to your back.
To help keep your back healthy and avoid further pain:
Sleep Well
Bad posture while sleeping often causes back pain. Always sleep on your side and firm surface rather than on soft mattresses like an amerisleep mattress. If you feel back pain on a regular interval, then there are mattresses available in the market, especially for back pain patients.
Always sit in a chair that is designed to keep your back straight and practice good posture when you stand.
Healthy Weight
It has often seen that overweight is the cause of back pain. Our ribs and area above the legs already bear most of the body’s weight, and when you are overweight, it puts extra weight on that part of our body. So, eat fruits and green vegetables and avoid eating processed food. Hit gym regularly to get your body lean and toned.
Also, avoid lifting heavy weights.
Calcium
As you know, calcium makes our bones strong. It also protects your spine from osteoporosis. Eating calcium-rich foods in your diet such as milk and dairy products, finger millet, green leafy veggies, sesame, small fish with bones, etc. reduce the chances of getting serious lower back pain. So, increase your calcium intake.
Change Your Lifestyle
If you work in an office, bend forward after every few minutes and sit for longer hours then keep stretching and doing office yoga at work to avoid getting lower back pain.
Author – This post is written by Jane who has written reviews about mattresses available in the market for back pain.
I’d never been squeamish about talking about bodily functions. At university, I was a peer contraceptive counselor (meaning I handed out condoms on the quad and happily explained the inner workings of our reproductive systems to fellow students) and I’ve gone so far as to solicit drawing of vulvas from people, so I was surprised that when I started experiencing menstrual cramps so bad that I could hardly get out of bed in the morning, I kept quiet. Despite the fact that the pain made it so hard for me to go to work, it took me a year to tell my boss. And I hardly mentioned it to my closest friends and family.
Dysmenorrhea, the technical term for extreme period pain, is a common problem. According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, up to 20% of women suffer from menstrual cramping severe enough to interfere with daily activities. But unlike the skiing-aficionado in your office who excitedly explains how he broke his arm on the slopes, many menstruating women grimace through their pain in silence.
Vagina Dispatches: Stopping Periods
In 2013, I was surprised to find myself as one of these silent sufferers. I started having two-week-long periods accompanied by cramps so bad I couldn’t move for days. I bled heavily for 12 to 30 days at a time, often with only days of a break in between. Put another way, the average ovulating woman has bled for a total of nearly one year since the 2012 election but I’ve nearly doubled that. Added together, I’ve had my period for longer than Trump’s presidential campaign. Hard to say which is worse.
When I finally had surgery to have fibroids removed from my uterus this year, friends remarked how they’d had no idea I was ever suffering. Now that I’m recovered, I have the energy back to think through what happened. Why didn’t I speak up about my menstrual pain? Why don’t others?
Some doctors don’t take women’s pain as seriously
For women who do speak up, their pain is often downplayed or ignored. I’ve read story after story after story after story of women whose pain was not taken seriously by physicians when something was seriously wrong (I saw three specialists before I was finally treated properly). A study, The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain, found that while women experience “more frequent and greater pain” than men, they are likely to “be less well treated than men for their painful symptoms”.
Dr Beth Darnall, a clinical associate professor in the division of pain medicine at Stanford University and a pain psychologist at the Stanford Pain Management Center has seen this phenomenon first-hand. She said that by the time patients reach her pain clinic, they’ve “seen multiple providers, they’ve been through primary care for their pain, they’ve probably seen another specialist, and then they come to us”.
It’s already hard to be a woman in the workplace
As a woman in the workplace, there is a maze of social issues navigate. You need to pay extra consideration to how to talk, how to dress and how to ask for a raise … and you still may receive a biased performance review. Considering that the mere fact of having a woman’s name can be enough to hold you back from a promotion, it’s easy to imagine how you might not want to remind your co-workers about your painful bleeding vagina.
Some companies are adopting menstrual leave policies to deal with the problem. Coexist has created an official “period policy” to let women take time off after director Beth Baxter noticed “women at work who are bent over double because of the pain caused by their periods” who “feel they cannot go home because they do not class themselves as unwell.” But not everyone is in favor of this idea. Self magazine found that women at Coexist were divided on the policy, but those arguing against it wanted more flex time for all employees.
Menstruation is still stigmatized
Periods are such a social taboo that in one study, women who dropped tampons out of their purses were perceived asless well liked and considered less competent. Others didn’t want to sit next to them. So you can imagine my anxiety about displaying an ultra-level tampon (yep, they exist) on my way to the bathroom.
It was hard to talk about the pain I suffered from an abnormal period, but it’s often as hard to even talk about normal ones. This is a large part of what the Vagina Dispatches series is trying to address. It’s hard to talk about periods, period. Even ads for tampons and pads – supplies designed specifically for periods – still show blue liquid instead of blood.
… and as a result, women aren’t receiving the education they need
Menstruation is natural, but for it to cause extreme pain isn’t. However, because so many of us are never taught very much about what to expect from our periods in the first place, it’s hard to tell when something’s wrong. “Menstrual pain is wrapped up in a natural female phenomenon,” Darnall said. “We may be more likely to minimize it until it’s a really big problem.”
Some celebrities, such as Lena Dunham and Padma Lakshmi, are raising awareness about menstrual pain. But even those without famous names or named disorders shouldn’t suffer in silence.
