Pain in the muscles and joints is the most common type of pain. Everyone experiences it at some time. Although unpleasant, it is a very necessary part of the survival mechanisms built into our bodies. Without pain we would not know when our body is being injured. Pain is the signal that tells us to stop doing whatever it is that is creating the pain, because something is wrong.
Sometimes patients tell me that they just want the pain to go away. They wish they never had to feel pain. I gently remind them that this is possible through contracting the disease leprosy. It destroys the pain nerves in your body. Unfortunately without the pain cycle, your body does not initiate healing and every little injury festers until body parts start falling off. I don’t think most people want to avoid pain that badly.
Never the less, we would like to manage pain to decrease it to the minimum amount necessary that still allows healing. A lot of time pain is a consequence of us doing something that over burdens our muscles and produces little tears in the muscles and possibly even in the ligaments. These little tears directly trigger pain nerves at the moment of injury to let us know to stop doing whatever we are doing. Then the damaged tissues leak out various chemicals that trigger the release of pain causing chemicals called prostaglandins and cytokines. These trigger the inflammatory response, which is the first stage of healing. The continued pain is to tell us not to stress the injured area while it heals because it is weak. This is all good unless we are stubborn and determined to do what we want to do which will produce even further injury. The pain stops this sort of stubbornness – usually.
Pain is unpleasant, and if we are smart we know enough to protect the injured area while it heals, so we don’t really need all that pain to keep reminding us. This is where pain relievers come into the picture. Typically people reach for the medicine cabinet and grab some anti-inflammatory drugs (aspirin, Tylenol, ibuprofen) to dull the pain. The problem is that these drugs are not really safe. Yes, in small occasional doses most of us will not have too much trouble with them. But what happens four hours later and the pain relieving effect has worn off? Do we reach for another dose? Misuse (meaning normal use for more than a day or two) causes four million hospital visits a year, 100,000 hospitalizations, and 16,500 deaths each year. These drugs are dangerous when used often.
Opiate drugs work well for pain but have a whole different set of problems, like addiction. That problem has become a national epidemic.
I have written recent newsletters about a couple healthy ways to reduce pain at home using high doses of omega 3 fish oil and using CBDs from hemp in capsule form. These are good options, but anything you take orally affects the whole body. It does not just go where you want it to go, so its effect is very diluted. For muscles and joints we want a pain reducer that is specific to the painful area. Obviously Chiropractic or massage are great options, but for immediate treatment at home, that means something you rub onto the afflicted muscle or joint.
There are a ton of sports rubs and muscle pain relievers on the market, like the Biofreeze we have in the office. These mostly all work on the counter-irritant effect. Basically the body will pay more attention to an annoying irritation on the surface of the skin and block the awareness of the deeper muscle or joint pain underneath that patch of skin. To confirm this for yourself, just slap the skin over a sore muscle and notice how you stop feeling the muscle and only feel the sting in the skin for a while. Most such products use menthol as the skin irritant and it works well for what it is.
There are many other ways to affect pain in muscles and joints. I mentioned prostaglandins as a cause of pain; the most common one is cox-2. This is what NSAID medications work on. The problem is these drugs cause bleeding in your GI tract, but using them directly on a joint does not have this problem. This is the idea behind aspercreme. The same effect is produced by boswellic acid found in frankincense essential oil.
Another potent anti-inflammatory is the extract from ginger called gingerol. Ginger is part of the same plant family as turmeric and cardamom. Clove oil is another potent anti-inflammatory due to its elevated levels of eugenol. Another kitchen anti-inflammatory is cinnamon oil, which not only fights inflammation but also increases circulation to speed the healing of the tissues.
A classic pain reliever for sore muscles and joints is wintergreen oil. It is quickly absorbed through the skin and acts like a numbing agent similar to cortisone. The active component is methyl salicylates, which is very similar to the active component in aspirin. Another similar oil is peppermint oil, which is very helpful for aching backs, sore muscles, tension headaches, Fibromyalgia pain, and Myofascial Pain Syndrome. Of course this list would not be complete without mentioning Arnica Montana. Arnica has been a first line of defense for surface injuries, like bruises and injured muscles, for ages.
Many of my patients have been raving about how well the CBD balm we have been carrying in the office works. They uniformly are surprised at how well it calms down pain. The CBDs work through a completely different pain relieving mechanism that has only recently been discovered in the body. There are CBD receptors on most every cell in the body and our body actually produces its own form of CBDs – the endocannaboid system.
So as you can see, there are many different ways to decrease pain locally at the site of injury without having to dose the entire body with some drug. Each of these different substances works through its own specific mechanism. My thought was why not stack the many effects to produce a greatly amplified pain relieving result? Toward that end I am creating a blend of all the above oils, including twice the concentration of CBDs that is found in our beloved CBD Balm. I have been testing my first batch on patients over this last week and should have a finished product in the office very soon.
I am excited at the thought of creating a really good pain relieving product that is not going to create problems in the body like the pharmaceuticals do. It will be interesting to hear how folks use this product and how it works for them.