Pain relief is a major concern for the majority of Americans. Unfortunately our current lifestyle generates a lot of pain. 55% of Americans reported a pain episode in the last 3 months. Over 25 million Americans have daily chronic pain. When I go to various official websites addressing pain, they only list four basic pain killing drugs – acetaminophen (Tylenol) , NSAIDS (aspirin, ibuprofen), cox-2 inhibitors (Celebrex, Vioxx), and opiates (fentynl, morphine). There are hundreds of brand names for these drugs and their variants, but basically that’s it as far as our pharmacy goes.
The problem is that all of these drugs have a very dark side to them. Acetaminophen destroys your liver with even a very small overdose. NSAIDS chew up your GI tract and kidneys. Cox-2 inhibitors cause heart attacks. And the opiates are killing people off right and left – at the latest count over 35,000 people a year are dying from taking opiate pain relievers. These are dangerous drugs and we take them like candy. The seductive thing about them is that they are relatively harmless when taken only once in a while for only a couple days and only within the recommended doses.
A good example is opiate medications – when they are used more than five days in a row, they trigger inflammation in the glial cells of your brain producing systemic fibromyalgia type pain. The very thing you are taking for pain actually produces more pain. But in the short term, opiates are super beneficial – at least I was very happy to have IV morphine in the hospital years ago when a kidney stone got caught in my ureter and the docs had to go up and retrieve it. That would have been a much nastier experience without a powerful pain killer like that. I have even been known to use an ibuprofen or two when I have strained arm muscles after doing too much trimming of tree branches. But in each case the med use was only for a day, so it was pretty safe.
That is all well and good for temporary acute pain episodes, but what can we do about chronic pain? Chronic pain is very common. Arthritis, chronic headaches, low back pain episodes, post surgical pain, the list goes on and on. Our prescribed pain killers are not designed for chronic usage. Doctors tell us to use these things for chronic pain mostly because we demand they do something about our pain, but the big truth is they have nothing that is safe for use with chronic pain. Some hospitals are recognizing this sad fact and are creating chronic pain clinics to teach people how to deal with their chronic pain.
I have written several articles on how to decrease pain levels naturally. That is really my bread and butter, as most patients I see are there for some sort of pain issue. Fortunately my style of Chiropractic works very well for their pain most of the time. I recommend the use of heat followed by cool over painful nerve roots in the spine to decrease pain while the joint swelling is coming down.
I have written about various essential oils to both decrease the pain perception as well as actually decrease the pain communication molecules. I recommend fish oil to reduce the over all levels of inflammation in the body as well as magnesium. The newest addition to our natural pain killing arsenal is CBD oils. This appears, from the reports of my patients, to be the most powerful and effective pain killer yet. So what are they?
CBD oils are herbal extracts from the leaves and “glands” of the cannabis sativa plant, more commonly known as marijuana. The plant is high in a class of chemicals called cannabinoids, with over a hundred different forms discovered so far. The most widely known cannabinoids are THC and CBD. THC is the component that some varieties of the cannabis plant have that produces the “getting stoned” effect, but not all varieties of cannabis have THC levels that have any effect. The types of cannabis that are bred to be high in CBD and low in THC are used for the medical effect of pain reduction. Extracts of CBD oil from these low THC varieties are now widely available for our use in combating pain.
I have been recommending CBD oil now for about a year and patients are loving it. I like it because it does not seem to have any toxic effects on the body. There is no concern with overdosing on CBD oil as you can take doses of 100 times the normal without any ill effects. This is totally not the case with normal pain killers. The effectiveness is about on par with ibuprofen, so it is not as strong as the opiate pain killers. But then you are not going to die or become addicted to CBD oil like you can with the opiates. Plus you can take much larger doses to get a stronger effect safely.
Personally I do not like the taste of CBD oil, so I prefer to use CBD oil capsules. I have tried several of the liquids with various flavors added, and found them all to be nasty. Some people tell me they do not mind the taste, so there you go. I also created my own CBD balm combined with 9 other essential oil plant extracts which each decrease pain in their own way. That would be my Pain Erase roll-on balm. The capsules contain 15mg of CBD oil – a good size dose – for only $70 a bottle of 60 capsules. Patients in the medical marijuana biz tell me that this is a really good price for that amount of potency.
So CBD oil is now my “go to” pain killer of choice for life’s aches and pains. I still take my fish oil and stay off sugar, seed oils, grains and other inflammatory foods. I have even resumed a little water fasting to get rid of joint pains – very effective! But I know most people want and
need a little pain relief that is just a swallow away. For that there is now CBD oil – a pain killer that is both safe and effective.