You've clearly never had a surgery. Many invasive surgeries can result in lifelong pain with no underlying cause. Having a doctor muck about with your internals leaves nerve endings in the wrong place and scar tissue that will never heal.
Source: Had two pneumothoraces that resulted in lung surgery years ago, still get pain every day that I just have to ignore.
While the parent is being a bit crass, there is a valuable underlying point. Ignoring pain is akin to ignoring the "check engine light". We (as a society) should really try to figure out the root causes AND (not or) find more targeted pain management. Perhaps your pain can be safely ignored (from a medical point of view). Perhaps its truly a signal there is a new or greater risk.
Well as you can imagine, chest pain is rather worrying. I've been to the ER and seen various doctors (and had a lot of xrays and CT scans done). They haven't found anything, and told me it's to be expected with the surgeries I've been through.
Humans aren't engineered like vehicles. Sometimes you just have a faulty "check engine light" and there's nothing you can do about it.
Pain was once considered a fact of life, and vital signs were those 4 signs which can indicate a patient is alive: body temp, pulse, respiratory rate, and blood pressure.
Then the notion of pain as the "fifth vital sign," came about. Some argue we resultantly now have an opioid epidemic.
Acute and chronic pain are different. The point isn't to find the cure that blocks all pain at all times, or to do it completely unsupervised. But under doctor supervision a real cure for chronic pain (not a load of opioids) would be a life changer for so many people.
> Ignoring pain is akin to ignoring the "check engine light".
I had surgery to remove a cyst that resulted in some scar tissue developing that presses on a nerve when stretched or compressed. Pretty acute pain when that happens - and pretty constant low level pain otherwise. No real "cure" as the odds are very high that the scar tissue will just re-form when excised.
In my case it's more like the "check engine light" was rewired to also light up when you press the clutch pedal. Sometimes all you can do is put some electrical tape over the light.
Unfortunately most chronic pain has no clear cause. That's why spinal surgery is much more discouraged these days for spinal pain. Artifacts on spinal MRIs for example are only slightly correlated with pain. Many people have severe problems in their spine and no chronic spinal pain and many people have no clear problem and terrible spinal pain. The nervous system is complicated and there are a lot of risk factors for developing chronic pain: job dissatisfaction, sitting all day long, depression, repetitive strain, stress, etc. And no, it isn't mental or psychosomatic, it's very real. It's in the peripheral nervous system and the base of the brain.
Did you read the article? It mentions fibromyalgia, which is a chronic pain condition with an unknown root cause. If you have any information the rest of the world doesn't have regarding the root cause of it, maybe you should have made that your comment instead of a cliche aphorism.
It's not quite as unknown as commonly believed. At least 40% of fibromyalgia have observable neuropathy on biopsies pointing to a process that is damaging nerves. The "what" is still unknown. But the parent is correct to say for fibromyalgia patients the optimal solution is a treatment (or cure) targeting that damaging process, rather than a pain killer.
This is not to say better pain killers aren't valuable, they obviously are, it's just that for many of these chronic pain disorders there is some underlying cause that if we can treat would be the better solution.
No, that doesn't really make sense. Note in your example of cancer that pain killers are in fact given to cancer patients, they're one of the biggest users of our strongest pain killers. But nobody claims painkillers treat the cancer. So how could we claim pain killers treat other illnesses such as fibromyalgia?
Chemotherapy is a treatment that targets the actual cause of the pain (the cancer) and (hopefully) kills it, leading to remission and (hopefully) return to normal function of the person as a cancer free individual.
A pain killer is something that does not target the cause of pain, does not treat or reverse or cause remission for that cause, and does not cause the individual to be illness free.
It just makes the person feel less pain, so they can be more comfortable.
Chemotherapy is the known cure for cancer, so a more accurate statement would be saying, "Pain killers are pointless, just find a cure for the cancer."
But no one is saying painkillers is pointless. Parent is saying painkillers should be temporary. I suspect they forgot to mention the "in an ideal world" bit.
This is well understood by pain researchers and the article explicitly mentions that they are trying to find solutions that address chronic pain without impacting the pain responses you are referring to.
"The team bred genetically engineered mice from embryos that had HCN2 excised from their DNA. Subsequent experiments showed that these mice did not develop neuropathic pain (the kind that affects the nervous system and is often caused by long-term conditions such as cancer or diabetes). Not only that, the mice with HCN2 cut out were still able to feel acute pain – the necessary, protective jolt that tells us to remove our finger from a drawing pin. “That’s the holy grail,” McNaughton told me"
Pain is sometimes a symptom of something else. The overwhelming belief that pain is always a symptom of something else has held back research for decades.
"At least initially, a clinician probably will assume pain is a symptom of some underlying condition and prescribe analgesics, while focusing on discovering what the underlying problem might be. But if a cause cannot be found, if early treatments fail to bring improvement, and if pain persists for several months, it may progress to the point where it becomes a disease in itself, that is, an abnormal condition that impairs or disrupts normal bodily functioning (this is almost always chronic pain). Then, regardless of the initiating process, cause, or underlying disease, the clinician must focus on management of the pain condition in order to assist in restoring the individual to a better state of health. This is not to say that all pain is a serious disease. When pain is a disease in itself, however, it requires comprehensive assessment, care planning, and treatment."
Actually, that is a common issue with chronic pain, and thankfully that's far from the truth.
Chronic pain clinics have a physical therapist that shows muscle building exercises, so the body stops being worn out.
However, depending on what the kind of wear is, as paradoxical as it seems, going for a walk for at least 20 minutes, can charge an exhausted body more than laying down without napping.
What if the root cause is something that's simply broken? Like a smashed vertibrae in my case. The root cause was falling from a cliff without any protection besides a helmet.
This is not medical reality. Chronic pain is usually caused by an up-modulation of pain transmission in the peripheral and central nervous system. It is totally distinct from acute, short term pain with a clear cause. It is treated differently, responds differently to medications and is generally a horrible malady compared to acute pain.
Opioids work wonders for chronic pain, the downside being obvious, but when used responsibly they are a lifesaver.
Lurk any chronic pain support group and you will find hundreds of people terrified of going back to the dark ages before opioids. Over-enforcement of the epidemic is real and doing damage to already damaged people.
That's because opioids remain the single most effective pain treatment that humans have available. People have been using them for 4000+ years, they have a long track record of efficacy (and safety).
Managing pain with opioids is not much different than managing diabetes with insulin. I realize the media mania and moral panic doesn't convey that because it doesn't fit the hype narrative, but there is a huge difference between medical patients and drug abusers.
To answer the headline, there already is a cure to chronic pain and it is called correct diagnosis.
When i was 21 I had chronic pain for 8 months, doctors gave me anti-biotics, NSAIDS, steroids.....but pain was just there. After months of research I found a surgeon in California, who performed surgeries on "Sports Hernia", almost like inguinal hernia without any bumps. I flew out to have the surgery, pictures taken during showed almost total rips of internal/external obliques in my groin area. This was not picked up by an MRI, as specific MRI settings need to be used. When I called different MRI places to talk about settings they did not know what the hell I was talking about. If I did not do my own research, I would literally still be living with this pain. I mentioned sports hernia to at least 4 doctors and they said it is "rare".
Oddly enough I have symptoms of fibro, after flouroquinolone antibiotics reaction. It is very frustrating that doctors are ignoring the cause and going straight to medicating. Side effects of these drugs are widely under-reported, and many fibromyalgia patients actually are suffering from FQAD, which is flouroquinolone associated disability. It affects the neurological system and tendons/muscles.
There is some new research coming to the surface talking about possible mtDNA toxicity. This would be better treated with supplements that support mitochondria, rather than medication. Also, best treatment for tendinitis is eccentric exercise not NSAIDs or steroids.
Additionally, by focusing on treating pain only when there is widespread tendon issue for example, patients are feeling better, therefore, putting more load on tendons, leading to more damage but hey at least they are hooked on opiates, cymbalta or any other wonder drug they come up with.
I'm not saying there is no place for medicating pain, when pain is due to scar tissue, nerve damage or other. I just have a problem with doctors tossing whatever medication they can without doing proper research.
>there already is a cure to chronic pain and it is called correct diagnosis.
There are many many conditions where even with a proper diagnosis there is little help.
One of the easiest things to do with chronic pain patients is to minimize or handwave their pain as transient. There is no surgery for many of these people. No drugs that aren't heavily addictive. Little to no hope of anything but a lifetime of pain.
> There are many many conditions where even with a proper diagnosis there is little help.
Yeah, my dad has very bad diabetic neuropathy and there isn't really anything they can do about that condition from what I understand. I'm sure there are plenty of other conditions like Fibromyalgia and more.
I've lived 12 years with chronic pain caused by a smashed vertibrae from a climbing accident.
No _legal_ drugs that aren't heavily addictive. And the predictable result is that you can't even get legal medicine that works any more, because no one dares to touch the addictive stuff.
And I sort of get it, I went through hell getting off OxyNorm/Contin after the accident. But it's really shitty to leave people hanging with no legal alternatives.
Edit: What kind of person down votes this? I would seriously consider seeking help.
Have you tried the Butrans patch? It is buprenorhpine and as of February, 2018 there is no legal restriction on it under CDC/FDA policy: unlimited prescriptions. No special license required to prescribe it (it is against regulation to use the patch for addiction). It is now generic ($160/month with a coupon, usually requires a prior authorization), and doesn't:
* Get you high
* Make you drowsy
* Addict you (yes, you'll have a tolerance, but no it won't be a problem)
* Give you cravings
* Stop your breathing
Each patch lasts a week and if they stick to my oily skin (I once dumped a 10 day heart monitor in 8 hours), it will stick to anyone. And you know what? It's not that much less effective than morphine. And it's even refillable.
Have you tried all the non opioid options? Lyrica, Gabapentin, Trifexis, Cymbalta, Nortriptyline (and other TCAs), etc? Lyrica is for nerve pain but Gabapentin and the others are used for all kinds of pain. CBD has limited evidence for helping nerve pain, but be aware that it has a long (>24 hour) half-life and can make you slightly high if you take enough daily (yes, in high enough doses it is psychoactive). There is good evidence for glucosamine/chondroitin for arthritis. There is limited evidence for tuermeric/curcumin (and its cheap!) for helping pain. There is limited evidence for SAM-E (but not if you've ever been manic) for pain. Are you on an NSAID? What about Tramadol? And for me, prednisone is a lifesaver for flights and conferences - I can't do either without it, but obviously you don't want to take it a lot. Great for flareups.
Have you tried compounded topicals? I have 9% Lidocain (store is 4%, pharmacy 5%), 9% Diclofenac (insurance covers 1$), 8% Tramadol (no mental effects), 2% cyclobenzaprine and 0.2% clonidine. You can pack in 30% of medicine, though I take 31.2% cause they still fill it. Topicals never helped me much - in particular lidocaine did shit. Until I tried 10%, that was magic. Most pain is felt on the skin - even organ pain, so you should definitely try this if you haven't. You can get a custom formulation fit exactly to your pain.
What about the various interventions offered via injection/rhizotomy? Do you see a physiatrist? Have you been to see an interventional anaesthesiologist? If you're really suffering have you asked about a spinal stimulator?
If you try most everything on the list, they will write you opioids even today, if buprenorphine doesn't cut it. Maybe you've tried all this stuff but most people I encounter on Quora aren't even anywhere near the end of the road and have given up.
Many people are unwilling to take drugs that affect the brain, and I always conclude they must not hurt very much because I'd take a pill with a 90% chance of curing me and a 10% chance of killing me.
Good list. I tried some items on the list, I am still working on seeing what works. Currently trying PT to see if tendons will improve, and NSAIDS but those don't seem to work.
Good to hear, never give up. PT is the first way to go, and it’s worth trying different forms like Yoga, anything that can work the painful part gently, and retrying it periodically if it doesn’t work. If you’re missing opioids, I’d definitely request the Butrans patch. Sorry, I’m an enthusiast:) For me it’s side effect free, maybe a very, very slight sedation, but I’m not even sure it is so mild.
>If I did not do my own research, I would literally still be living with this pain
If you want to hire someone to do a job, you need to know how to do the job yourself. If you don't know, then you're prime target for stunt performances or casual incompetence.
> If you want to hire someone to do a job, you need to know how to do the job yourself.
This is simply not possible with the degree of specialization in the modern economy. There's no way you can be an electrician-plumber-mechanic-doctor-lawyer-IT specialist.
This is precisely why people care about reputations and gossip.
He is not wrong. I know quite a bit about plumbing, electrical work, car repair......Large amount of people who are licensed or considered experts are pretty terrible or generally lazy and cut corners. Finding someone good is really difficult.
> There's no way you can be an electrician-plumber-mechanic-doctor-lawyer-IT specialist.
That's an interesting list. I agree with your general feeling on this. But in my case, out of necessity, I have had to become an expert in each of the fields you mention, and many more. By expert I'll say I know more than the average licensed person. The average. I also have cultivated professional relationships with people in each of the categories who are competent and know more than me. Which is a minority of each field.
I think that "If you want to hire someone to do a job, you need to know how to do the job yourself." is true in many ways because the average level of competence by specialists is low. I also agree that it's not easily possible to be competent as a very competent specialist in all of these fields. Where we perhaps disagree is that I would say it is possible for an amateur to become above average compared to professionals in all of these fields. In most of these fields I would much rather pay someone to do it. I don't particularly enjoy the work. But paying someone gets me substandard and incompetent work even in licensed fields most of the time, until I know more than the average practitioner.
Also when we are talking about a lot of trades, though smart people used to be well represented in them, it's less the case these days. So tradesmen often don't have a lot of sense for diagnosing or doing proper work. A smarter person is going to be able to do a better job, even though he doesn't want to have to do that. But he may have no choice if he wants work done properly.
As far as reputation and recommendations I've personally found that seldom works to find the best people. I recognize others experience may differ. The problem is the person doing the recommendation will recommend a relative, friend, or someone they know who does bad work but they don't realize it because they are unable to judge it properly. For a recommendation to be good the recommend-er also has to know enough about the field to identify skilled practitioners. Most people don't know this much unless they are skilled in the field themselves.
The best people I've found have been through brute force search techniques of hiring over and over until I find someone that is able to do things well.
Chronic pain isn't a condition, it's a symptom. That's why proper diagnosis is the solution, because the million different "chronic pains" you can have will be treated a million different ways, and you either need to know which one or try them all and risk the side effects, as they did in the GP's comment.
It's not just chronic pain. There are multiple kinds of depression, multiple kinds of anxiety, multiple kinds of autism, adhd, and so on.
As long as the medical industry, especially the psychological industry, continues to name diagnoses off of their symptoms instead of naming them what they actually are, it becomes difficult to create procedures and medicine that work for all people.
Did you have a specific event that caused your injury, that led you to do your own research in that direction?
And are you hypothesizing that your injury may be related to prior fluoroquinolone use?
Proper diagnosis is hard, and most doctors are generalists rather than specialists. A common medical aphorism is "When you hear hooves, think of horses not zebras".
Yes, I was liftings weights, felt a pop, instantly thought....oof hernia, but doctors disagreed as they could not feel any bumps and I suffered for months. Flouroquinoles came after and are unrelated to that injury.
Flouroquinolones are pretty terrifying. I had a bad reaction that basically gave me a constant low-grade panic attack. Felt like the sensation of betrayal or impending doom in my chest. Luckily I only had minor tendon issues as I discontinued after a week.
If your doctor prescribes "Cipro" or other FQ's as a first line, ask them if there are any other options.
There is usually no cure for chronic pain. This is medical fact. Your case is not descriptive. It is usually not caused by scar tissue, or an infection. For example MRI reports are only slightly correlated with actual spinal pain. It generally involves an up modulation of pain sensation in the peripheral and central nervous system. It is worthwhile to investigate the cause but most people don't find a cure like you did. There is no cure for most chronic pain patients.
This is an extremely harmful answer. Do not listen to this person. If you have chronic pain, see a pain management specialist - a physiatrist or an interventional anaesthesiologist, or both. There are many non-opioid options that work extremely well. They can coordinate other care.
That’s exactly the kind of diagnosis you get when the real answer is “I don’t know.” Peripheral nervous system issues may be the root cause for some chronic pain, but it’s very difficult to rule out all other causes.
Also, MRI’s are still very much blunt instruments. A high resolution 1 millimetre scan is still representing ~100,000+ cells per voxel.
I'm not saying don't investigate. Its been ten years for me, and I'm still investigating. But the numbers are clear: usually there is no clear cause except a poorly understood change in the nervous system. The answer for most people is, "I don't know," with the current sophistication of medicine. You can't try harder and find the answer because there is no answer at this time for most people.
For arthritis, take a look at Sulforaphane. It is being tested on humans and dogs for arthritis with good results. Sorry I dont have links handy, but you can find them on nih.gov. Sulforaphane is also being used to reverse autism.
You're falling into the classic trap of thinking doctors know everything, but sorry to say that's not even close to true. Most doctors know next to nothing about myofascial pain (even many that really should). I've seen multiple cases of mobility impairment and chronic pain that even well a respected orthopedic surgeon thought required surgery be corrected by aggressive bodywork, including trigger point myofascial release and dry needling.
Doctors sometimes get things wrong. That doesn't mean you're MORE likely to get the answer from a layperson -- it's still much more likely that your doctor got it right.
> corrected by aggressive bodywork, including trigger point myofascial release and dry needling.
It was corrected, but that doesn't mean those techniques are what corrected it.
I am glad you found a diagnosis and treatment. It is good to research and seek diagnosis and treatment.
But that's not what GP is saying. GP is saying that associating diagnosis with resolution is a recipe for disappointment and wasted effort. Given our current abilities and the state of the art, finding a cause is not possible for many people, period. It is great that some people find a cause. It is also great that some people turn hard work into millions of dollars. That does not mean that it is a reasonable expectation for others--in fact, it is a harmful one, that obviates or distracts from more constructive alternatives, which GP suggested.
>This is an extremely harmful answer. Do not listen to this person.
They just want to help, and for all anyone knows, they are helping. Saying it's an extremely harmful answer is not only untrue, it's harmful to discourage conversation that can lead to progress.
However, it is helpful to let people know what options they have and who and what they can go to for help. GPs should be doing this, but you'd be surprised how little they know about chronic pain. I've yet to bump into a GP who forwards people with chronic pain in the right direction.
>If you have chronic pain, see a pain management specialist
This is so important. Few know there are chronic pain centers people can go to that literally specialize in just chronic pain. They can help. They usually consist of three doctors and a physical therapist. For people with years of chronic pain a combination of things needs to be done at once to help them get out of it.
Also, optimism is helpful because it can prevent learned helplessness. Imagine living a life in chronic pain that could be cured, but instead every hypothetical was shot down, so not enough attempts towards a solution was made.
To answer the headline, there already is a cure to chronic pain and it is called correct diagnosis.
Correct diagnosis combined with proper and effective treatment. Sadly, medicine doesn't offer effective treatment for the underlying cause of pain in far too many cases.
If you have FQAD, you might try looking up "nutrient depletions" for any and all drugs you were on. Also, look up any nutrients that need to be taken with those nutrients. So, for example, if they cause magnesium deficiency, you will probably need not only magnesium, but also calcium and vitamins D and K and maybe something else as well.
There are a ton of studies correlating fibro with gut bacteria.
People with chronic pain have different levels of certain gut bacteria. One study claims to have cured fibro through FMT. That study has 1 subject... lol.
I am almost certain the cure for some chronic pain is in bacteria. It's cool hearing what you say about Mitochondria though.
There are many mentions and discussions of fluoroquinolones on YC News, including my own recommendation [1] to be very careful with them, based on personal experience. Also, the spelling is fluoroquinolone, not flouroquinolone. (That is, flUOro, not flOUro.). I'm not being picky; I just want people to be able to successfully search for the term.
The discussion surrounding my comment is quite interesting, too, and worth reading.
Although there is value in trying to removing pain when doing so would be ethical, this thread mentions many situations where there is pain but no possibility yet of removing or reducing it. In these cases, a long-term general solution is to continue research on these situations. But the short-term solution per person is to learn the meaning and value of suffering. It is frowned upon in intellectual forums to discuss religion, as if religion were incompatible with logic and reason. But Jesus came to teach us how to endure suffering without failing in our duties. That is what he did, what he showed us how to do, and what he gives us the power to do through the Sacraments, especially Holy Communion. Because this is true power: to endure suffering without failing. And evil means failure because it is an absence of power to do what is both good and proper; sin is simply a lack of power. You will not learn any of this in any philosophy or world-religions class, or intellectual discussions over caviar. You will only learn and understand this through experiencing it, which can only be started by a humble trust that Jesus came into this world to suffer and die for our sake, out of love for us, and he will teach us how to do good, even in the midst of suffering. He knows our pain better than we do. He suffered more than we ever could.
Let's see jesus crush a few vertebrae and live disabled for 40 years without pain meds, and then talk about suffering.
Like I get it. Religion does help many, and it can take you away from pain, but suffering is real and don't shortchange people's misery who are dealing with it.
I'm deeply sorry for your suffering. 40 years is a very long time, and it's not a coincidence that throughout history 40 has been the number representing trial and suffering. Jesus does know what you have gone through. He's not "some religion" but a person. He can help you. He's the only one who can help you.
I am glad to find another religious person here! Think and pray more about Jesus and you will discover that he would not have allowed anyone to take his place, because as he said, "My soul is trouble, but what shall I say, 'Father save me from this hour?' No I tell you, for this purpose I have come to this hour." He would never escape it, and he would not allow anyone to take anyone from it.
My worship is directed towards God alone and we were given the Qur'an to clarify these matters among other things, read here if you'd like to understand the Islamic view of the crucifixion: https://quran.com/4/157-167
Thank you friend for that perspective. I have read the Islamic perspective of these matters. We Christians also worship God alone, we have that in common with you. We just believe that Jesus was truly God, while being the Son of God also. This is why king David speaking by the Holy Spirit says "the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand," calling his descendent Lord. This is the Trinity and we admit it is a great Mystery that we cannot ever fully comprehend. But our belief in this is founded on the Resurrection. How could over so many people, many of them who followed Jesus for 3 years straight, including his own mother, confuse Jesus with someone else? And more to the point, how could Jesus show up to all of these same people, totally over 500 people, with holes in his hands and feet and side, and them still believe he was crucified and yet glorified, if he wasn't both?
I was going to make a similar comment, so I'll tag on here. Jesus was supposedly crucified for a few hours, which would be terrible, but he also knew what was waiting him, and that he would be remembered and revered.
In contrast, my sister suffered through multiple rounds of chemo, then a divorce by a husband who was jealous that she was "getting all the attention". The cancer spread to her brain and spine and lungs, and towards the end even morphine couldn't stop the pain. She had to say goodbye to her sons without knowledge of what was to lie in store for her or them. When she died, she stayed dead, none of this "Tada! I died without the consequences of death" nonsense.
You assume you know just how much (or how "little") Jesus suffered, based on a physical description. I felt the same way for a few years. But his was physical, spiritual, emotional, mental, all at once, for almost a full day straight, and intensified beyond what you can imagine. He barely showed any typical signs, like screaming out in pain or cursing people, because he is all-powerful, and those come from a lack of power. But there are an abundance of signs that he suffered far more than an ordinary crucifixion, which was already excruciating by today's standards - in fact that's where the word comes from.
You are absolutely right -- I don't know how much he suffered. But then again, people who claim he suffered unimaginable pain because he accepted the sin of humanity have no idea how much it hurt (if you accept such a thing is possible).
This is just typical having it both ways -- he was fully human and fully divine. That isn't some cosmic thing worth pondering -- it is just a contradiction. If you believe he is god and that it was unimaginably painful, then you should also accept as god he has infinite tolerance for pain and so it isn't so impressive.
He allowed himself to feel the fullness of that suffering to expiate our just punishments, and to merit for us a portion in his strength to overcome suffering, and so that nobody could ever say "God does not know what it means to suffer like I am."
Jesus did not take away my suffering. I asked him three times, and three times he said no. He said his grace is sufficient for me, because his power is made perfect in my weakness. I now understand why Jesus said no. Because he did not come to take away suffering, but to teach us how to endure it without failing ourselves or others.
I don’t think speaking about religion is a problem. Here's what I think, for what is worth:
First, your message may give the impression that you are giving an unfounded lesson to some people here. “You will not […]”
Second, you may be speaking a language to which not everyone is receptive. For instance, you are stating things about our duties, but people who don’t see a meaning or a goal in life (does it sound sad?), or don’t feel they have a specific duty may not fully understand your message.
Some people here may also be seeking evidences for some statements you make because they are not obvious to them. For instance: how can you know that nobody will ever suffer as much as Jesus or more? Is there a study out there finding this result?
Though I may also be doing the mistake you may be doing, that is, not speaking the right language to be understood (I may also have offended you by doing so and I'm sorry for that if that is the case). Quite like in the following copy-pasted joke:
---
A religious women upon waking up each morning would open her front door stand on the porch and scream,
“Praise the Lord.”
This infuriated her atheist neighbor who would always make sure to counter back,
“There is no Lord.”
One morning the atheist neighbor overheard his neighbor praying for food, thinking it would be funny, he went and bought her all sorts of groceries and left them on her porch. The next morning the lady screamed,
“Praise the Lord, who gave me this food.”
The neighbor laughing so hard he could barely get the words out screamed
“It wasn’t the Lord, it was me.”
The lady without missing a beat screamed:
“Praise the Lord for not only giving me food but making the atheist pay for it!!”
Thank you for that wonderful joke! Your advice reminds me of what Ven. Fulton Sheen talks about here[1], and your great joke reminds me of his other videos[2]. Bless you friend and thanks again :)
> a humble trust that Jesus came into this world to suffer and die for our sake
'humble trust' is a genuinely useful attitude to have towards reality, but impossible to achieve towards a description of the world one does not believe to be true.
You have things backward - if you genuinely intend your prescription to be helpful you need first to offer your readers reasons to believe your specific supernatural claims to be true.
There is an overabundant proof that the Catholic Church's teachings are true. The only reason people do not believe is because they do not want to. They choose to believe logical fallacies and pretend it's logically consistent rather than believe the truth.
> There is an overabundant proof that the Catholic Church's teachings are true.
Most people clearly don't accept this. Which leads us to:
> The only reason people do not believe is because they do not want to
What's your evidence for this? It's certainly counter to most non-Catholics' own statements. So they're either lying or deceiving themselves. Each option would need extremely strong evidence for a reasonable person to believe it.
I'd be interested in your response to a bald statement like "There is an overabundant proof that Hindu/Buddhist/animist/Islamic/Gnostic/whatever teachings are true". No doubt the more extreme members of each of these faith communities will make such proclamations. What's a poor rational non-believer to do? Spend a lifetime assessing the claims of dozens of different religions? I guess you'd insist they should ignore the others and look only at yours. Why?
> They choose to believe logical fallacies and pretend it's logically consistent rather than believe the truth.
Do you really believe truths about the world can be deduced through logic? Would you put your children if you have them in an aeroplane that had been constructed out of a mind of a genius logician?
Logic can get us very far. Socrates was martyred because he taught that there is only one God, and there is objective morality that we must follow to be with God. He reached these conclusions by logic alone. But Divine Revelation is necessary for the fulfillment of human understanding and our perfection. Jesus crucified and resurrected is the start of this, because nothing any wise teacher or religious founder says matters unless it can save us from death. This is the only religion that can, because it's not a religion as much as a Living Being that we can encounter immediately, and who will save us if we only let him.
Oh dear. Because my fairly comprehensive skepticism on metaphysical claims applies as much to hubristic scientistic materialism as any other, I tend to be a defender of religious believers possibly holding their views rationally. But they do usually disappoint me.
You seem like a very logical and intelligent person who values truth. So I encourage you to investigate these things yourself. Because they are all true.
i certainly appreciate what you have to say, but as a somewhat ardent atheist i contend entirely the idea that you absolutely have to understand and trust that Jesus came to suffer and die for our sake in order to get started on the right path, if only because there are several other religions across the world with their own disparate belief systems that have nothing to do with Jesus and im pretty sure some of those people came to the same point without accepting Jesus' suffering. so, if they can do so without it, then I think there is more than one way to do it, and certainly a secular way that doesn't require one to accept extraordinary claims without the requisite extraordinary evidence to back them up.
that being said, i would not ever want to try to convince someone who isn't interested in doing so to give up their faith, so please don't take this as a form of that. only trying to be intellectually fair and consider those outside of the situation you have represented.
This is the most common cop-out of our day, and it's one I also used for many decades. But it is an intellectual cop-out. There is significantly more proof for Jesus's claims as represented by the Catholic Church than for any other religious beliefs. The only reason people do not believe it is because, at least deep down, they do not want to.
is there something wrong with not believing because you don't want to? and what if the reason you don't want to is because you define belief as something that requires evidence in order to practice? i really don't appreciate what you're doing here. I was trying to simply say that everyone has their own path in life, but instead of trying to meet me halfway and understand that, you're telling me that there is an over abundance of evidence for the existence of Jesus (which I will agree, there probably was a guy named Jesus, but hell there were probably a lot and the character of the Christ was most likely a syncretic mix of all of them) compared to that of other religions, but that being said i clearly mentioned that I am an atheist, so the supposed lack of evidence of other religions (which I personally believe doesn't really matter because since when was religion entirely evidence based anyway? faith is the art of believing that which you have no evidence for!) doesn't really change anything in my case. I was more trying to defend other people that you were isolating by making such a claim, and by extension, stress the fact that there is no absolute guarantee that if one submits to Jesus that one will absolutely have a better life. I've met plenty of people who have done so who may pretend to have a better life on the surface but really just have an invisible guy in the sky to point to and say "well this must be your plan so who am I to question it?"
anyway, i respect your right to believe what you want, but i think you're living in a really small bubble if you think that Christianity, and specifically the Catholic sect thereof, is the only way to find happiness and comfort in life. it's sorta poisoning the well by outright assuming some specific conclusion is already true and then arguing based on that conclusion without providing evidence to support it. if you have sufficient empirical evidence, maybe you should lead with that rather than suggesting that there is more of it than other religions. burden of proof, etc.
Look around you. Nobody is truly happy in life that you've ever met. Not consistently, not genuinely happy. When hard times come, most people buckle. The only people were the Saints. They were happy even during suffering. This is the power of Jesus. Like you said, many people pretend to be happy but are not. The Saints truly are.
And as if that wasn't enough testimony of Jesus's resurrection, consider the many miracles that attest to Catholicism. A significant number of undisputed miracles are attributed to the Saints, and Marian apparitions, and Eucharistic miracles, and intercessory miracles. Even in our times! Consider that in our own times, a woman was instantly and miraculously healed of a very deadly internal bleeding by crying out to John Henry Newman for his intercession. A baby dead for 61 minutes came back to life through the intercession of Fulton Sheen. These have been officially verified by medical professionals.
There is an overwhelming superabundance of proof for Catholicism. The only reason people make excuses to avoid looking into it is because they know what it means: real change. And they're afraid of change, because they have no faith that God is good and that God's changes to our lives will be good and that God wants good for us.
"For no one can draw near to God unless they believe that he exists, and that he rewards those who seek him." Many people believe one or the other, but few people have faith in both.
i personally never said anything about being happy. I said pretending to have a better life. just for what it's worth, i don't think that happiness = a better life. if anything, being a slave to happiness is just another mundane chemical attachment that we all allow to control our lives. i get that most people want to be happy and it's easier to convince other people to believe you it you can point to something and say "ah but look how happy it makes me and other people", but unfortunately you're not going to convince me with that. i personally believe that the only way to a better life is in having balance in all things; sadness is just as important as happiness. when you cut one side of the equation off, you cause a decline in homeostasis and your body and mind must react in order to try and get back to balance.
as far as miracles, im sorry but I don't believe in magic spells and third party attestations as to their veracity. humans will see and believe what they want to see and believe. and they will do whatever they can to maintain a consistent worldview, even if that means discarding a rational explanation for what happened.
as far as God being good, I'm sorry but have you read the old testament? the new testament and the word of the Christ might be the foundational text of Christianity, but the fact of the matter is Yahweh of the new testament is still Yahweh of the old testament. he may have made a new covent with humanity, but imagine some serial killer killed hundreds of people, then suddenly one day said "ok i know I did some bad things but I totally promise that I won't do those things anymore." would you believe him? if not, why would you believe Yahweh meant it? because he gave divine inspiration to people and essentially guided them to write a bunch of propaganda that says "God is good!" despite all the atrocities that were committed in his name and according to his word? need i mention, say, the canaanites and the amalekites? I'm sorry, but God is not good. he is a vengeful, imperfect being who is jealous and even admits it and yet people just ignore that to take what they want from the religion because it suits them. and it's fine if that's what you're doing, just be willing to admit it and accept that if you can do that, then I certainly can just as well take what was said in the Bible as proof that it is nothing more than allegorical and somewhat historical, and made by man to justify the behavior of a very restricted group of individuals.
> if anything, being a slave to happiness is just another mundane chemical attachment that we all allow to control our lives.
You confuse happiness with comfort and pleasure. This happens to people who have never experienced true happiness. You can't describe color to someone who's blind.
> as far as miracles, im sorry but I don't believe in magic spells and third party attestations as to their veracity. humans will see and believe what they want to see and believe. and they will do whatever they can to maintain a consistent worldview, even if that means discarding a rational explanation for what happened.
You don't want to believe. That is why you don't believe in facts that are attested to independently by competent medical professionals under oath.
Answering the headline: maybe, when we finish getting out of the 'steam age' of medicine.
Long term might grow closer to current science fiction. Very precise robotic surgery at an atomic level reconstructs whole bodies (my favorite case being the beginning of The Fifth Element), less extreme examples also exist and we might someday get to the point where "knives" are replaced with gentle 'unzipping' tools or even grey-goo that slowly scrubs over an area and just sets everything correct.
"For people who live with chronic pain, getting up, out and moving can seem daunting. Some fear that physical activity will make their pain worse. But in fact, researchers find the opposite is true: The right kind of exercise can help reduce pain."
This is true to some extent - use it or lose it. They also teach you to know your limits so your pain doesn't flareup and put you in bed for a week. You learn this delicate balance this over time, to push yourself just enough but not too much. At first you hurt yourself constantly because your body can do whatever you want - right? But no. Not now.
That fact doesn't really make it easier to get out of bed. Your brain tells you not to move, that you're injured. Rest. Its an animal thing. You have to overcome it each morning, and all day long. And unfortunately that takes energy. It drains you. You have much less capacity as a result. Everything in life is harder. You do the best you can. This is the reality of disability.
And this is where using pain meds can help. Get the pain down to a lower level and then you can attempt to do normal functions. Key being not so much pain reduction that you can cause physical harm (masking good pain response).
I know (second hand) what chronic pain can do to the desire to get up and function. It destroys it.
My SO has lived with it for almost 20 years now, and is due to live with it the rest of her life.
There is no cure for her condition. You cannot fix the root cause (sympathetic nerve dysfunction)
She can only hope to numb the signals to allow her to see past the pain.
I can understand how, for some conditions, exercise could help, not just physically, but against the depressing effects of chronic pain.
But absolutely not for all conditions. For too long, doctors have pushed graded exercise programs for essentially all chronic pain conditions, despite good evidence that it can be harmful, even permanently, for some conditions (e.g. CFS).
I personally suffer from chronic pain, caused by small fiber neuropathy. I used to love walking, and I want to exercise - but if I do too much it can take days or even weeks to recover. A few times, I'm fairly sure I made things permanently (or hopefully semi-permanently) worse.
So, yes, exercise does help some people, but we must be careful not to push it as the be all and end all.
>good evidence that it can be harmful, even permanently, for some conditions (e.g. CFS).
No, there is certainly no evidence that exercise can be permanently harmful for CFS. In fact, all the studies show that graded exercise is beneficial.
It's certainly true that exercising too hard for too long can be detrimental and can cause a crash, and patients do need to be careful. Exercise certainly isn't a cure for CFS, and I wouldn't recommend graded exercise myself, but it's untrue to say that there is evidence that it makes patients permanently worse.
Another name for cfs is "systemic exertion intolerance disease". This alternative name never caught up, but it does describe the reality of the ilness quite accurately. Post exertional malaise is literally the defining symptom of cfs, so yes exercise in cfs makes you worse. You can tolerate some mild forms of exercise if you have a mild form of cfs, but that's about it. Also stop spreading lies, Simon Wessely's studies are deeply flawed, to say the least.
While it's true that patient surveys generally report worsening after GET, that isn't quite the same standard of evidence as a Cochrane review. The Cochrane review had similar conclusions in 2004, long before PACE [1].
A detailed survey by Action 4 ME found that of patients who reported undergoing GET:
"11 Had NO professional input (had they therefore paced themselves ?) – mostly with positive outcomes
6 Were supervised by occupational therapists – all with negative outcomes
3 Had been sent to the gym- all negative outcomes!" [2]
When GET is done properly, it generally involves reducing activity first of all if the patient is already overdoing it, reducing stress, replacing stressful with non-stressful activity, using heart rate monitors, etc.
We could argue back and forth in perpetuity about the quality of both the Cochrane review (for example, there are claims that their diagnostic criteria for even having CFS were not good enough) and the data against GET :)
My point was simply that there does exist a large body of evidence supporting my original comment, even if there is also evidence against it.
Tangent from the article, but when I read the headline I thought I'd at least share in case it helps anyone who might have chronic pain like I've dealt with lately.
For years now I've been suffering from tons of weird shit. I've had this persistent painful skin rash that pops up all over my body. Steroids would kill it for awhile but it would always come back. Folks would ask me if I had burned myself when they'd see places on my skin. Just chalked up to an allergy from my doctors (to what? many things they guessed).
To top that fun off, my knees and one shoulder have been killing me. Had trouble walking up stairs. Couldn't do pull-ups anymore without extreme pain. I'd wake up in pain. Just constant pain. People just chalk that up to me getting older. Arthritis I guess.
But then my wife felt like trying to do some Whole 30 kind of thing. I hate this stuff. But whatever. She needed support so I went along with it. Cut out gluten, dairy, alcohol, sugar. Low-carb. High protein.
And after a week: I could move my arm above my head again. Walking up stairs became normal. Huh! Cool!
I thought, maybe my body just needed a reset and gave that diet up.
All this stuff came back.
Now realize how important it is for me to stay on a low-carb diet. It doesn't seem to be gluten or dairy getting me. But sugar, alcohol and carbs. And I wouldn't say I was that bad at eating those before. But clearly I'm super sensitive to them.
Today, I stay on a low-carb diet. I cheat on Saturdays. Allow myself to eat the nominal sugary treat and have a couple alcoholic drinks. But I barely want to since my life is just like a billion times better.
All that joint pain is gone. My skin has cleared up. I'm doing pull ups again. Running a ton. Just did 8.5 miles today.
So, all I know, is if you feel like shit constantly, it might be worth throwing sugar and alcohol away. Might be worth trying an elimination diet. I can't believe how long I laughed this stuff off when clearly it's so incredibly important and has transformed my life.
Edit: I forgot to mention the brain fog I was living with too. There was a fluid in my ears screwing with my balance. Felt like I had a head cold. Also has cleared up.
The root commenter didn't claim anything that your earlier comment contradicted. They just explained that they found a correlation between diet and pain (along with other physiological symptoms). Nobody said anything that excluded the notion that the pain was a symptom of an illness. Indeed, when is pain ever not a symptom of illness or injury?
Please point to the research paper(s) that document "chronic pain" as a condition experienced by people who are otherwise perfectly healthy.
I've had (and to some degree still have) the condition I think you're talking about. I've had pain in various parts of my body for 15+ years, and it's been difficult to isolate a cause. But there is a cause, and now it's been found, it's being treated, and the condition is subsiding.
And yes, avoiding sugar/alcohol/gluten/dairy (along with other known inflammatory food ingredients) has been a part - though not all - of my treatment.
This is not some "random experiment"; it's an approach that has been widely tested and is advocated by many practitioners, including conventional physicians.
Whats your daily mealplan look like? I tried the Tim Ferriss slow carb diet and had success losing weight. And loved the cheat day. But didn't feel different, per se. I too have weird one shoulder push-up pain, though. So you have my attention!
Here's my some basic rules as best as I can describe it. It's not super scientific and fairly Slow-carb like. I'm still experimenting as it's really hard to dial in the specifics.
Breakfast: Spinach+carrot+blueberry+strawberry+banana+flax+protein powder smoothing. We're careful with how much fruit we put in this. Can definitely make this even lower carb if we wanted to.
Lunch and dinner: eat pretty normally, but I keep it as low carb as possible. I also keep it fairly light in gluten and dairy. I worry I might be sensitive to gluten. It seems like that's causing my wife migraines too.
For example: Had burgers last night but no bread, no potatoes, no cheese. Just meat and veggies. Desert is usually just rice cakes with peanut butter (just nuts and salt, no added sugar) and cinnamon.
Really just followed that for 5 days and its recipes.
I've also started fooling with not eating breakfast until 10am or later. This has helped with getting a ton of exercise done in the morning because now I don't feel so heavy doing something like running for an hour and a half.
EDIT: Also been enjoying Freshly and their microwavable meals. It's all gluten free and easy to sort their meals by carb intake.
I've been losing weight using a keto diet, which is very low-carb:
- No more than 20g of NET carbs per day. (Carb grams minus soluble fiber grams in the US; food labels in other countries may already show Carb grams with the fiber subtracted out.)
- Fat depends on your goals and hunger. If you're trying to maintain your current weight, eat enough fat to satisfy your hunger after the carbs and protein. If you're trying to lose weight, eat less fat than that. And if you're trying to gain weight, eat more.
The limit on NET carbs guides you towards high-fiber plants, and away from sugar, most flours and other refined carbs, and starchy plants like potatoes and rice. It also limits the amount of fruit you can have, because of their high sugar content. (Occasional berries is your best option.) You'll also end up gluten free, because anything with gluten is going to be too many carbs.
It takes a week or two for most people to get past the carb-addiction cravings when starting this, and you'll feel like an addict in withdrawal. Electrolytes help. Pickle juice is great. After a month or so, you start feeling a lot better.
A helpful welcoming community can be found at /r/keto
Wow, great comment Nate that was rewarded with some equally eye opening advice for you to look into. I’d like to echo your message of some type of elimination diet being a valuable experience for anyone. I did the Whole 30 as well and it truly is amazing to discover how what you eat can have such a profound effect on how you feel. As I write that it seems so silly and obvious but until you really get a “reset” it’s easy to get used to feeling pretty average to lousy.
Acute pain is a symptom. Chronic pain is a disease.
Most chronic pain is not directly connected with a root cause. Spinal MRIs for example are poor predictors of spinal pain. It is an upmodulation of pain sensation in the peripheral nervous system/brain stem. It isn't mental and it isn't psychosomatic - it is very real. And you can't just ignore it - although there are techniques in pain psychology that help.
This is hopeful, but then so are Nerve Growth Factor drugs and it isn't looking too good for them at the moment. The second to last drug in trials failed the safety trial. At any moment we could learn the last drug failed as well, and then the entire group is DOA. Drug development is horrible to wait on, for people that badly need the drugs.
Animal trials work in humans what, 10% of the time? This is great research, but it won't be a treatment for at least a decade, if ever :(
"In many cases, however, the source of chronic pain can be a very complex and even mysterious issue to untangle. Although it may begin with an injury or illness, ongoing pain can develop a psychological dimension after the physical problem has healed. This fact alone makes pinning down a single course of treatment tricky, and it is why health care providers often find they have to try a number of different types of curative steps."
Psychological is wrong, there's nothing psychological about it - wrong part of the brain. The brain stem is not psychological, its neurological. Psychological techniques can help you cope, though.
Psychosomatic == real. If your heart rate increases when you are frightened, is that imaginary?
While some research shows changes in the brainstem, fMRI shows differences in blood flow in various parts of the brain associated with processing emotions. Right now we don't have a definitive answer as to what causes chronic pain. But we do know for certain that the parts of the brain dealing with pain are also involved in emotional processing.
It's actually very easy to demonstrate to yourself that pain can be psychosomatic. If you're riding your bike and imagine falling off, you will experience real pain. (At least, it happens for me, and I assume I'm not the only person who that happens to).
Here is an interesting fMRI study looking at the effects of pain processing in both fibromyalgia patients and healthy participants:
Chronic pain is not psychosomatic. That has nothing to do with chronic pain. People like to blame the patient, that they're not trying hard enough to will their way through it... like you do through any other challenge. That is a really harmful attitude. You mean well, but you're hurting the people you treat this way. You should educate yourself about what chronic pain is if you want to be inspirational rather than causing harm. A chronic pain patient can't psych themselves out and not hurt. There are some techniques in pain psychology that help a bit, like mindfulness techniques or imagining the pain tingles but doesn't hurt, but they're only somewhat effective and that is as good as it gets in terms of psychology.
When one has enough chronic pain, they lay in bed for extended periods of time. This deteriorates the muscles, and a lack of muscle strength can create chronic pain, creating a feedback loop.
It's why chronic pain centers prescribe a physical therapist and muscle strengthening exercises.
Likewise, as you suspect when it comes to neurology, if something happens over and over again the brain creates a map for it, which when it comes to chronic pain can make things worse. One of the solutions found is to prescribe an antidepressant, even if the person isn't depressed, as it helps rewire those kinds of parts of the brain. This is why at chronic pain centers there is a psychiatrist too.
Once those two issues are reduced or removed the chronic pain is often minimized enough (and sometimes entirely removed) the source of the chronic pain can become easier to see. Often the pain is still there, but it's no longer masked. This then helps identify the issue. eg for me, despite being 20/20 I have eye strain. Switching to a 4k monitor helped a lot, but I wouldn't have noticed a reduction in pain if I hadn't have gone through the physical therapy and been on an antidepressant for a couple of months.
This is like asking "Will there be a cure for chronic being-sick?" - this is meaningless. Chronic pain has innumerable possible causes. Suppressing the symptoms to stuff is not a cure.
If you look at the causal end, sure. But if you look at the symptom side, why not?
At the end of the day, pain is reducible to neurons firing in succession. If you can stop it, interrupt it, filter it or block it, you would have something.
I'm sure you're already on top of all of this and I hope you'll forgive the tangent, but if you're starting to get RA symptoms you should be acting now. It used to be the practice of rheumatologists to wait to treat until symptomatic relief was required by patients. That's no longer the case. The earlier you act and get on DMARDs (and you might even need to try a few before getting one that works or finding the one that works best. Humira was completely ineffective for me), the less cumulative joint erosion you'll experience, the sooner you'll likely be in remission, and the more likely you'll be to experience a later sustained DMARD-free remission.
Even if that's not the case and DMARDs don't completely solve the problem for you, there's a lot of options before opiods for symptomatic relief. From panadol, through NSAIDs (including the magical COX-2 selectives), and even steroidals.
Don't give up hope too early. Three years ago I couldn't dress myself. Today I just got back from a rock climbing holiday.
Thanks for the advice but even if the doctor told dad all that I'm not sure he'd understand. I've heard of DMARDs but never read up on them if I did tried to explain it to dad he'd never sit still to listen.
He's still quite strong sick as he is and age 76 he lifted and emptied a large bucket of rocks, then complained of shoulder pain. I think dementia and old age are a factor here too, poor judgement. People laugh at the joke "if that hurts don't do that" but it's too true.
He's on a couple of strong pain meds and steroids. He's a bit better now that he started oxygen he doesn't look as pale.
I'm glad to hear you're doing well it's a terrible disease not like there's a good disease. Just make sure to keep an eye on your lungs.
Wow this really rings true for me. One of the most frustrating parts of chronic pain is the constant chorus of people explaining that yoga, or massage, or acupuncture, or crystals, or a no carbs diet will cure it.
Once in a while it would be great for someone to just respond "that sucks".
This is a nonsensical premise to me masked by the fact that we use one phrase "chronic pain" to represent a huge range of experiences. And then because we have this one phrase we throw the other word cure in front of it like this semantic trick represents the possibility of achieving it.
I don't buy it. Chronic pain is a thousand different problems and I think it will be solved piece by piece by debugging those individual problems.
Sure, there is always the placebo effect possibly. There is a question though of those who kill themselves after they've been stung by some kind of snake or wasp that is apparently so painful that death is the only relief.
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[ 6.9 ms ] story [ 666 ms ] threadManaging pain should only be a temporary measure.
Source: Had two pneumothoraces that resulted in lung surgery years ago, still get pain every day that I just have to ignore.
Humans aren't engineered like vehicles. Sometimes you just have a faulty "check engine light" and there's nothing you can do about it.
Then the notion of pain as the "fifth vital sign," came about. Some argue we resultantly now have an opioid epidemic.
There is a fascinating NPR show episode on this topic: https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/701219878/the-fifth....
Edit: another source of info: https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/publichealth...
I had surgery to remove a cyst that resulted in some scar tissue developing that presses on a nerve when stretched or compressed. Pretty acute pain when that happens - and pretty constant low level pain otherwise. No real "cure" as the odds are very high that the scar tissue will just re-form when excised.
In my case it's more like the "check engine light" was rewired to also light up when you press the clutch pedal. Sometimes all you can do is put some electrical tape over the light.
This is not to say better pain killers aren't valuable, they obviously are, it's just that for many of these chronic pain disorders there is some underlying cause that if we can treat would be the better solution.
Chemotherapy is a treatment that targets the actual cause of the pain (the cancer) and (hopefully) kills it, leading to remission and (hopefully) return to normal function of the person as a cancer free individual.
A pain killer is something that does not target the cause of pain, does not treat or reverse or cause remission for that cause, and does not cause the individual to be illness free.
It just makes the person feel less pain, so they can be more comfortable.
But no one is saying painkillers is pointless. Parent is saying painkillers should be temporary. I suspect they forgot to mention the "in an ideal world" bit.
"The team bred genetically engineered mice from embryos that had HCN2 excised from their DNA. Subsequent experiments showed that these mice did not develop neuropathic pain (the kind that affects the nervous system and is often caused by long-term conditions such as cancer or diabetes). Not only that, the mice with HCN2 cut out were still able to feel acute pain – the necessary, protective jolt that tells us to remove our finger from a drawing pin. “That’s the holy grail,” McNaughton told me"
"At least initially, a clinician probably will assume pain is a symptom of some underlying condition and prescribe analgesics, while focusing on discovering what the underlying problem might be. But if a cause cannot be found, if early treatments fail to bring improvement, and if pain persists for several months, it may progress to the point where it becomes a disease in itself, that is, an abnormal condition that impairs or disrupts normal bodily functioning (this is almost always chronic pain). Then, regardless of the initiating process, cause, or underlying disease, the clinician must focus on management of the pain condition in order to assist in restoring the individual to a better state of health. This is not to say that all pain is a serious disease. When pain is a disease in itself, however, it requires comprehensive assessment, care planning, and treatment."
From the peer-reviewed source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92517/
Chronic pain clinics have a physical therapist that shows muscle building exercises, so the body stops being worn out.
However, depending on what the kind of wear is, as paradoxical as it seems, going for a walk for at least 20 minutes, can charge an exhausted body more than laying down without napping.
Lurk any chronic pain support group and you will find hundreds of people terrified of going back to the dark ages before opioids. Over-enforcement of the epidemic is real and doing damage to already damaged people.
Managing pain with opioids is not much different than managing diabetes with insulin. I realize the media mania and moral panic doesn't convey that because it doesn't fit the hype narrative, but there is a huge difference between medical patients and drug abusers.
To answer the headline, there already is a cure to chronic pain and it is called correct diagnosis.
When i was 21 I had chronic pain for 8 months, doctors gave me anti-biotics, NSAIDS, steroids.....but pain was just there. After months of research I found a surgeon in California, who performed surgeries on "Sports Hernia", almost like inguinal hernia without any bumps. I flew out to have the surgery, pictures taken during showed almost total rips of internal/external obliques in my groin area. This was not picked up by an MRI, as specific MRI settings need to be used. When I called different MRI places to talk about settings they did not know what the hell I was talking about. If I did not do my own research, I would literally still be living with this pain. I mentioned sports hernia to at least 4 doctors and they said it is "rare".
Oddly enough I have symptoms of fibro, after flouroquinolone antibiotics reaction. It is very frustrating that doctors are ignoring the cause and going straight to medicating. Side effects of these drugs are widely under-reported, and many fibromyalgia patients actually are suffering from FQAD, which is flouroquinolone associated disability. It affects the neurological system and tendons/muscles.
There is some new research coming to the surface talking about possible mtDNA toxicity. This would be better treated with supplements that support mitochondria, rather than medication. Also, best treatment for tendinitis is eccentric exercise not NSAIDs or steroids.
Additionally, by focusing on treating pain only when there is widespread tendon issue for example, patients are feeling better, therefore, putting more load on tendons, leading to more damage but hey at least they are hooked on opiates, cymbalta or any other wonder drug they come up with.
I'm not saying there is no place for medicating pain, when pain is due to scar tissue, nerve damage or other. I just have a problem with doctors tossing whatever medication they can without doing proper research.
There are many many conditions where even with a proper diagnosis there is little help.
One of the easiest things to do with chronic pain patients is to minimize or handwave their pain as transient. There is no surgery for many of these people. No drugs that aren't heavily addictive. Little to no hope of anything but a lifetime of pain.
Yeah, my dad has very bad diabetic neuropathy and there isn't really anything they can do about that condition from what I understand. I'm sure there are plenty of other conditions like Fibromyalgia and more.
No _legal_ drugs that aren't heavily addictive. And the predictable result is that you can't even get legal medicine that works any more, because no one dares to touch the addictive stuff.
And I sort of get it, I went through hell getting off OxyNorm/Contin after the accident. But it's really shitty to leave people hanging with no legal alternatives.
Edit: What kind of person down votes this? I would seriously consider seeking help.
How do you deal with pain? Have you tried medical pot?
* Get you high * Make you drowsy * Addict you (yes, you'll have a tolerance, but no it won't be a problem) * Give you cravings * Stop your breathing
Each patch lasts a week and if they stick to my oily skin (I once dumped a 10 day heart monitor in 8 hours), it will stick to anyone. And you know what? It's not that much less effective than morphine. And it's even refillable.
Have you tried all the non opioid options? Lyrica, Gabapentin, Trifexis, Cymbalta, Nortriptyline (and other TCAs), etc? Lyrica is for nerve pain but Gabapentin and the others are used for all kinds of pain. CBD has limited evidence for helping nerve pain, but be aware that it has a long (>24 hour) half-life and can make you slightly high if you take enough daily (yes, in high enough doses it is psychoactive). There is good evidence for glucosamine/chondroitin for arthritis. There is limited evidence for tuermeric/curcumin (and its cheap!) for helping pain. There is limited evidence for SAM-E (but not if you've ever been manic) for pain. Are you on an NSAID? What about Tramadol? And for me, prednisone is a lifesaver for flights and conferences - I can't do either without it, but obviously you don't want to take it a lot. Great for flareups.
Have you tried compounded topicals? I have 9% Lidocain (store is 4%, pharmacy 5%), 9% Diclofenac (insurance covers 1$), 8% Tramadol (no mental effects), 2% cyclobenzaprine and 0.2% clonidine. You can pack in 30% of medicine, though I take 31.2% cause they still fill it. Topicals never helped me much - in particular lidocaine did shit. Until I tried 10%, that was magic. Most pain is felt on the skin - even organ pain, so you should definitely try this if you haven't. You can get a custom formulation fit exactly to your pain.
What about the various interventions offered via injection/rhizotomy? Do you see a physiatrist? Have you been to see an interventional anaesthesiologist? If you're really suffering have you asked about a spinal stimulator?
If you try most everything on the list, they will write you opioids even today, if buprenorphine doesn't cut it. Maybe you've tried all this stuff but most people I encounter on Quora aren't even anywhere near the end of the road and have given up.
Many people are unwilling to take drugs that affect the brain, and I always conclude they must not hurt very much because I'd take a pill with a 90% chance of curing me and a 10% chance of killing me.
If you want to hire someone to do a job, you need to know how to do the job yourself. If you don't know, then you're prime target for stunt performances or casual incompetence.
This is simply not possible with the degree of specialization in the modern economy. There's no way you can be an electrician-plumber-mechanic-doctor-lawyer-IT specialist.
This is precisely why people care about reputations and gossip.
He's not wrong that the problem exists. It even has a name: the principal-agent problem.
You're not wrong that the knowledge you have can help you sniff out bad actors. Every little bit helps.
But it's not scalable. There will always be parts of life that you need to hire help with, but know very little about.
How do you choose which hospital to have a baby at? Which criminal defense attorney to hire? Which violin tutor to hire for your child?
Reputation is one the key ways people try to solve this problem when they're completely out of their depth.
That's an interesting list. I agree with your general feeling on this. But in my case, out of necessity, I have had to become an expert in each of the fields you mention, and many more. By expert I'll say I know more than the average licensed person. The average. I also have cultivated professional relationships with people in each of the categories who are competent and know more than me. Which is a minority of each field.
I think that "If you want to hire someone to do a job, you need to know how to do the job yourself." is true in many ways because the average level of competence by specialists is low. I also agree that it's not easily possible to be competent as a very competent specialist in all of these fields. Where we perhaps disagree is that I would say it is possible for an amateur to become above average compared to professionals in all of these fields. In most of these fields I would much rather pay someone to do it. I don't particularly enjoy the work. But paying someone gets me substandard and incompetent work even in licensed fields most of the time, until I know more than the average practitioner.
Also when we are talking about a lot of trades, though smart people used to be well represented in them, it's less the case these days. So tradesmen often don't have a lot of sense for diagnosing or doing proper work. A smarter person is going to be able to do a better job, even though he doesn't want to have to do that. But he may have no choice if he wants work done properly.
As far as reputation and recommendations I've personally found that seldom works to find the best people. I recognize others experience may differ. The problem is the person doing the recommendation will recommend a relative, friend, or someone they know who does bad work but they don't realize it because they are unable to judge it properly. For a recommendation to be good the recommend-er also has to know enough about the field to identify skilled practitioners. Most people don't know this much unless they are skilled in the field themselves.
The best people I've found have been through brute force search techniques of hiring over and over until I find someone that is able to do things well.
But correct diagnosis does not imply there is a cure or treatment available for the condition?
As long as the medical industry, especially the psychological industry, continues to name diagnoses off of their symptoms instead of naming them what they actually are, it becomes difficult to create procedures and medicine that work for all people.
And are you hypothesizing that your injury may be related to prior fluoroquinolone use?
Proper diagnosis is hard, and most doctors are generalists rather than specialists. A common medical aphorism is "When you hear hooves, think of horses not zebras".
If your doctor prescribes "Cipro" or other FQ's as a first line, ask them if there are any other options.
This is an extremely harmful answer. Do not listen to this person. If you have chronic pain, see a pain management specialist - a physiatrist or an interventional anaesthesiologist, or both. There are many non-opioid options that work extremely well. They can coordinate other care.
For example here's a Quora answer listing just a few treatments for chronic arthritis pain: https://www.quora.com/What-do-I-do-as-a-chronic-pain-elderly...
Also, MRI’s are still very much blunt instruments. A high resolution 1 millimetre scan is still representing ~100,000+ cells per voxel.
> corrected by aggressive bodywork, including trigger point myofascial release and dry needling.
It was corrected, but that doesn't mean those techniques are what corrected it.
But that's not what GP is saying. GP is saying that associating diagnosis with resolution is a recipe for disappointment and wasted effort. Given our current abilities and the state of the art, finding a cause is not possible for many people, period. It is great that some people find a cause. It is also great that some people turn hard work into millions of dollars. That does not mean that it is a reasonable expectation for others--in fact, it is a harmful one, that obviates or distracts from more constructive alternatives, which GP suggested.
You’re espousing hippiedom and it’s top comment because of left wing ignorance.
Please don't be that guy.
They just want to help, and for all anyone knows, they are helping. Saying it's an extremely harmful answer is not only untrue, it's harmful to discourage conversation that can lead to progress.
However, it is helpful to let people know what options they have and who and what they can go to for help. GPs should be doing this, but you'd be surprised how little they know about chronic pain. I've yet to bump into a GP who forwards people with chronic pain in the right direction.
>If you have chronic pain, see a pain management specialist
This is so important. Few know there are chronic pain centers people can go to that literally specialize in just chronic pain. They can help. They usually consist of three doctors and a physical therapist. For people with years of chronic pain a combination of things needs to be done at once to help them get out of it.
Also, optimism is helpful because it can prevent learned helplessness. Imagine living a life in chronic pain that could be cured, but instead every hypothetical was shot down, so not enough attempts towards a solution was made.
Correct diagnosis combined with proper and effective treatment. Sadly, medicine doesn't offer effective treatment for the underlying cause of pain in far too many cases.
If you have FQAD, you might try looking up "nutrient depletions" for any and all drugs you were on. Also, look up any nutrients that need to be taken with those nutrients. So, for example, if they cause magnesium deficiency, you will probably need not only magnesium, but also calcium and vitamins D and K and maybe something else as well.
People with chronic pain have different levels of certain gut bacteria. One study claims to have cured fibro through FMT. That study has 1 subject... lol.
I am almost certain the cure for some chronic pain is in bacteria. It's cool hearing what you say about Mitochondria though.
The discussion surrounding my comment is quite interesting, too, and worth reading.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13275535
Let's see jesus crush a few vertebrae and live disabled for 40 years without pain meds, and then talk about suffering.
Like I get it. Religion does help many, and it can take you away from pain, but suffering is real and don't shortchange people's misery who are dealing with it.
In contrast, my sister suffered through multiple rounds of chemo, then a divorce by a husband who was jealous that she was "getting all the attention". The cancer spread to her brain and spine and lungs, and towards the end even morphine couldn't stop the pain. She had to say goodbye to her sons without knowledge of what was to lie in store for her or them. When she died, she stayed dead, none of this "Tada! I died without the consequences of death" nonsense.
This is just typical having it both ways -- he was fully human and fully divine. That isn't some cosmic thing worth pondering -- it is just a contradiction. If you believe he is god and that it was unimaginably painful, then you should also accept as god he has infinite tolerance for pain and so it isn't so impressive.
First, your message may give the impression that you are giving an unfounded lesson to some people here. “You will not […]”
Second, you may be speaking a language to which not everyone is receptive. For instance, you are stating things about our duties, but people who don’t see a meaning or a goal in life (does it sound sad?), or don’t feel they have a specific duty may not fully understand your message.
Some people here may also be seeking evidences for some statements you make because they are not obvious to them. For instance: how can you know that nobody will ever suffer as much as Jesus or more? Is there a study out there finding this result?
Though I may also be doing the mistake you may be doing, that is, not speaking the right language to be understood (I may also have offended you by doing so and I'm sorry for that if that is the case). Quite like in the following copy-pasted joke:
---
A religious women upon waking up each morning would open her front door stand on the porch and scream,
“Praise the Lord.”
This infuriated her atheist neighbor who would always make sure to counter back,
“There is no Lord.”
One morning the atheist neighbor overheard his neighbor praying for food, thinking it would be funny, he went and bought her all sorts of groceries and left them on her porch. The next morning the lady screamed,
“Praise the Lord, who gave me this food.”
The neighbor laughing so hard he could barely get the words out screamed
“It wasn’t the Lord, it was me.”
The lady without missing a beat screamed:
“Praise the Lord for not only giving me food but making the atheist pay for it!!”
---
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz0a3TSkHVU&t=8
[2] https://sdegutis.github.io
'humble trust' is a genuinely useful attitude to have towards reality, but impossible to achieve towards a description of the world one does not believe to be true.
You have things backward - if you genuinely intend your prescription to be helpful you need first to offer your readers reasons to believe your specific supernatural claims to be true.
Most people clearly don't accept this. Which leads us to:
> The only reason people do not believe is because they do not want to
What's your evidence for this? It's certainly counter to most non-Catholics' own statements. So they're either lying or deceiving themselves. Each option would need extremely strong evidence for a reasonable person to believe it.
I'd be interested in your response to a bald statement like "There is an overabundant proof that Hindu/Buddhist/animist/Islamic/Gnostic/whatever teachings are true". No doubt the more extreme members of each of these faith communities will make such proclamations. What's a poor rational non-believer to do? Spend a lifetime assessing the claims of dozens of different religions? I guess you'd insist they should ignore the others and look only at yours. Why?
> They choose to believe logical fallacies and pretend it's logically consistent rather than believe the truth.
Do you really believe truths about the world can be deduced through logic? Would you put your children if you have them in an aeroplane that had been constructed out of a mind of a genius logician?
that being said, i would not ever want to try to convince someone who isn't interested in doing so to give up their faith, so please don't take this as a form of that. only trying to be intellectually fair and consider those outside of the situation you have represented.
anyway, i respect your right to believe what you want, but i think you're living in a really small bubble if you think that Christianity, and specifically the Catholic sect thereof, is the only way to find happiness and comfort in life. it's sorta poisoning the well by outright assuming some specific conclusion is already true and then arguing based on that conclusion without providing evidence to support it. if you have sufficient empirical evidence, maybe you should lead with that rather than suggesting that there is more of it than other religions. burden of proof, etc.
And as if that wasn't enough testimony of Jesus's resurrection, consider the many miracles that attest to Catholicism. A significant number of undisputed miracles are attributed to the Saints, and Marian apparitions, and Eucharistic miracles, and intercessory miracles. Even in our times! Consider that in our own times, a woman was instantly and miraculously healed of a very deadly internal bleeding by crying out to John Henry Newman for his intercession. A baby dead for 61 minutes came back to life through the intercession of Fulton Sheen. These have been officially verified by medical professionals.
There is an overwhelming superabundance of proof for Catholicism. The only reason people make excuses to avoid looking into it is because they know what it means: real change. And they're afraid of change, because they have no faith that God is good and that God's changes to our lives will be good and that God wants good for us.
"For no one can draw near to God unless they believe that he exists, and that he rewards those who seek him." Many people believe one or the other, but few people have faith in both.
as far as miracles, im sorry but I don't believe in magic spells and third party attestations as to their veracity. humans will see and believe what they want to see and believe. and they will do whatever they can to maintain a consistent worldview, even if that means discarding a rational explanation for what happened.
as far as God being good, I'm sorry but have you read the old testament? the new testament and the word of the Christ might be the foundational text of Christianity, but the fact of the matter is Yahweh of the new testament is still Yahweh of the old testament. he may have made a new covent with humanity, but imagine some serial killer killed hundreds of people, then suddenly one day said "ok i know I did some bad things but I totally promise that I won't do those things anymore." would you believe him? if not, why would you believe Yahweh meant it? because he gave divine inspiration to people and essentially guided them to write a bunch of propaganda that says "God is good!" despite all the atrocities that were committed in his name and according to his word? need i mention, say, the canaanites and the amalekites? I'm sorry, but God is not good. he is a vengeful, imperfect being who is jealous and even admits it and yet people just ignore that to take what they want from the religion because it suits them. and it's fine if that's what you're doing, just be willing to admit it and accept that if you can do that, then I certainly can just as well take what was said in the Bible as proof that it is nothing more than allegorical and somewhat historical, and made by man to justify the behavior of a very restricted group of individuals.
You confuse happiness with comfort and pleasure. This happens to people who have never experienced true happiness. You can't describe color to someone who's blind.
> as far as miracles, im sorry but I don't believe in magic spells and third party attestations as to their veracity. humans will see and believe what they want to see and believe. and they will do whatever they can to maintain a consistent worldview, even if that means discarding a rational explanation for what happened.
You don't want to believe. That is why you don't believe in facts that are attested to independently by competent medical professionals under oath.
Long term might grow closer to current science fiction. Very precise robotic surgery at an atomic level reconstructs whole bodies (my favorite case being the beginning of The Fifth Element), less extreme examples also exist and we might someday get to the point where "knives" are replaced with gentle 'unzipping' tools or even grey-goo that slowly scrubs over an area and just sets everything correct.
"For people who live with chronic pain, getting up, out and moving can seem daunting. Some fear that physical activity will make their pain worse. But in fact, researchers find the opposite is true: The right kind of exercise can help reduce pain."
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/09/23/7548691...
That fact doesn't really make it easier to get out of bed. Your brain tells you not to move, that you're injured. Rest. Its an animal thing. You have to overcome it each morning, and all day long. And unfortunately that takes energy. It drains you. You have much less capacity as a result. Everything in life is harder. You do the best you can. This is the reality of disability.
It fucking sucks.
I know (second hand) what chronic pain can do to the desire to get up and function. It destroys it.
My SO has lived with it for almost 20 years now, and is due to live with it the rest of her life.
There is no cure for her condition. You cannot fix the root cause (sympathetic nerve dysfunction) She can only hope to numb the signals to allow her to see past the pain.
But absolutely not for all conditions. For too long, doctors have pushed graded exercise programs for essentially all chronic pain conditions, despite good evidence that it can be harmful, even permanently, for some conditions (e.g. CFS).
I personally suffer from chronic pain, caused by small fiber neuropathy. I used to love walking, and I want to exercise - but if I do too much it can take days or even weeks to recover. A few times, I'm fairly sure I made things permanently (or hopefully semi-permanently) worse.
So, yes, exercise does help some people, but we must be careful not to push it as the be all and end all.
No, there is certainly no evidence that exercise can be permanently harmful for CFS. In fact, all the studies show that graded exercise is beneficial.
It's certainly true that exercising too hard for too long can be detrimental and can cause a crash, and patients do need to be careful. Exercise certainly isn't a cure for CFS, and I wouldn't recommend graded exercise myself, but it's untrue to say that there is evidence that it makes patients permanently worse.
The Cochrane review[10] that includes the PACE trial has also been beset with complaints about its methodology[11].
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21334061/
[1] https://huisartsvink.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/severely-af...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19521443/
[3] https://huisartsvink.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/bringsli-20...
[4] https://huisartsvink.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/de-kimpe-20...
[5] https://www.nivel.nl/sites/default/files/bestanden/Rapport-d...
[6] https://huisartsvink.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/eyssens-pem...
[7] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28847166/
[8] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28805516/
[9] http://www.meassociation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/2...
[10] https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
[11] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6176540/
A detailed survey by Action 4 ME found that of patients who reported undergoing GET:
"11 Had NO professional input (had they therefore paced themselves ?) – mostly with positive outcomes 6 Were supervised by occupational therapists – all with negative outcomes 3 Had been sent to the gym- all negative outcomes!" [2]
When GET is done properly, it generally involves reducing activity first of all if the patient is already overdoing it, reducing stress, replacing stressful with non-stressful activity, using heart rate monitors, etc.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15266475
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20071019011737/http://www.afme.or...
My point was simply that there does exist a large body of evidence supporting my original comment, even if there is also evidence against it.
That's my queue to bid you adieu
For years now I've been suffering from tons of weird shit. I've had this persistent painful skin rash that pops up all over my body. Steroids would kill it for awhile but it would always come back. Folks would ask me if I had burned myself when they'd see places on my skin. Just chalked up to an allergy from my doctors (to what? many things they guessed).
To top that fun off, my knees and one shoulder have been killing me. Had trouble walking up stairs. Couldn't do pull-ups anymore without extreme pain. I'd wake up in pain. Just constant pain. People just chalk that up to me getting older. Arthritis I guess.
But then my wife felt like trying to do some Whole 30 kind of thing. I hate this stuff. But whatever. She needed support so I went along with it. Cut out gluten, dairy, alcohol, sugar. Low-carb. High protein.
And after a week: I could move my arm above my head again. Walking up stairs became normal. Huh! Cool!
I thought, maybe my body just needed a reset and gave that diet up.
All this stuff came back.
Now realize how important it is for me to stay on a low-carb diet. It doesn't seem to be gluten or dairy getting me. But sugar, alcohol and carbs. And I wouldn't say I was that bad at eating those before. But clearly I'm super sensitive to them.
Today, I stay on a low-carb diet. I cheat on Saturdays. Allow myself to eat the nominal sugary treat and have a couple alcoholic drinks. But I barely want to since my life is just like a billion times better.
All that joint pain is gone. My skin has cleared up. I'm doing pull ups again. Running a ton. Just did 8.5 miles today.
So, all I know, is if you feel like shit constantly, it might be worth throwing sugar and alcohol away. Might be worth trying an elimination diet. I can't believe how long I laughed this stuff off when clearly it's so incredibly important and has transformed my life.
Edit: I forgot to mention the brain fog I was living with too. There was a fluid in my ears screwing with my balance. Felt like I had a head cold. Also has cleared up.
I've had (and to some degree still have) the condition I think you're talking about. I've had pain in various parts of my body for 15+ years, and it's been difficult to isolate a cause. But there is a cause, and now it's been found, it's being treated, and the condition is subsiding.
And yes, avoiding sugar/alcohol/gluten/dairy (along with other known inflammatory food ingredients) has been a part - though not all - of my treatment.
This is not some "random experiment"; it's an approach that has been widely tested and is advocated by many practitioners, including conventional physicians.
Breakfast: Spinach+carrot+blueberry+strawberry+banana+flax+protein powder smoothing. We're careful with how much fruit we put in this. Can definitely make this even lower carb if we wanted to.
Lunch and dinner: eat pretty normally, but I keep it as low carb as possible. I also keep it fairly light in gluten and dairy. I worry I might be sensitive to gluten. It seems like that's causing my wife migraines too.
For example: Had burgers last night but no bread, no potatoes, no cheese. Just meat and veggies. Desert is usually just rice cakes with peanut butter (just nuts and salt, no added sugar) and cinnamon.
Also, no snacking. Just those meals. I'm done eating by 7pm at night. Here's the original ebook that kicked off how I eat now: https://drive.google.com/file/d/166FSLdptgLAiL96Hl29a_qss8HP...
Really just followed that for 5 days and its recipes.
I've also started fooling with not eating breakfast until 10am or later. This has helped with getting a ton of exercise done in the morning because now I don't feel so heavy doing something like running for an hour and a half.
EDIT: Also been enjoying Freshly and their microwavable meals. It's all gluten free and easy to sort their meals by carb intake.
- No more than 20g of NET carbs per day. (Carb grams minus soluble fiber grams in the US; food labels in other countries may already show Carb grams with the fiber subtracted out.)
- Protein depends on your lean body mass, age, sex, and activity level. See https://keto-calculator.ankerl.com/
- Fat depends on your goals and hunger. If you're trying to maintain your current weight, eat enough fat to satisfy your hunger after the carbs and protein. If you're trying to lose weight, eat less fat than that. And if you're trying to gain weight, eat more.
The limit on NET carbs guides you towards high-fiber plants, and away from sugar, most flours and other refined carbs, and starchy plants like potatoes and rice. It also limits the amount of fruit you can have, because of their high sugar content. (Occasional berries is your best option.) You'll also end up gluten free, because anything with gluten is going to be too many carbs.
It takes a week or two for most people to get past the carb-addiction cravings when starting this, and you'll feel like an addict in withdrawal. Electrolytes help. Pickle juice is great. After a month or so, you start feeling a lot better.
A helpful welcoming community can be found at /r/keto
https://www.amazon.de/Paleo-Approach-Reverse-Autoimmune-Dise...
It helped many people with diagnosed and undiagnosed autoimmune diseases and conditions.
Most chronic pain is not directly connected with a root cause. Spinal MRIs for example are poor predictors of spinal pain. It is an upmodulation of pain sensation in the peripheral nervous system/brain stem. It isn't mental and it isn't psychosomatic - it is very real. And you can't just ignore it - although there are techniques in pain psychology that help.
This is hopeful, but then so are Nerve Growth Factor drugs and it isn't looking too good for them at the moment. The second to last drug in trials failed the safety trial. At any moment we could learn the last drug failed as well, and then the entire group is DOA. Drug development is horrible to wait on, for people that badly need the drugs.
Animal trials work in humans what, 10% of the time? This is great research, but it won't be a treatment for at least a decade, if ever :(
Here's WebMD saying the same thing about what chronic pain is: https://www.webmd.com/pain-management/guide/cause-chronic-pa...
"In many cases, however, the source of chronic pain can be a very complex and even mysterious issue to untangle. Although it may begin with an injury or illness, ongoing pain can develop a psychological dimension after the physical problem has healed. This fact alone makes pinning down a single course of treatment tricky, and it is why health care providers often find they have to try a number of different types of curative steps."
Psychological is wrong, there's nothing psychological about it - wrong part of the brain. The brain stem is not psychological, its neurological. Psychological techniques can help you cope, though.
While some research shows changes in the brainstem, fMRI shows differences in blood flow in various parts of the brain associated with processing emotions. Right now we don't have a definitive answer as to what causes chronic pain. But we do know for certain that the parts of the brain dealing with pain are also involved in emotional processing.
It's actually very easy to demonstrate to yourself that pain can be psychosomatic. If you're riding your bike and imagine falling off, you will experience real pain. (At least, it happens for me, and I assume I'm not the only person who that happens to).
Here is an interesting fMRI study looking at the effects of pain processing in both fibromyalgia patients and healthy participants:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1016/j.ejpain.200...
No sense of pain can result in severe self-inflicted injuries and premature death
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...
My gut says a lot of “chronic pain” that ends up hardwiring the brain to be noticed.
Reinforce a neural pathway often enough and it won’t quiet down.
The buzz will be there and we can’t be sure our sore spot hurts or our brain simply can’t avoid that pathway.
See phantom limb and similar.
When one has enough chronic pain, they lay in bed for extended periods of time. This deteriorates the muscles, and a lack of muscle strength can create chronic pain, creating a feedback loop.
It's why chronic pain centers prescribe a physical therapist and muscle strengthening exercises.
Likewise, as you suspect when it comes to neurology, if something happens over and over again the brain creates a map for it, which when it comes to chronic pain can make things worse. One of the solutions found is to prescribe an antidepressant, even if the person isn't depressed, as it helps rewire those kinds of parts of the brain. This is why at chronic pain centers there is a psychiatrist too.
Once those two issues are reduced or removed the chronic pain is often minimized enough (and sometimes entirely removed) the source of the chronic pain can become easier to see. Often the pain is still there, but it's no longer masked. This then helps identify the issue. eg for me, despite being 20/20 I have eye strain. Switching to a 4k monitor helped a lot, but I wouldn't have noticed a reduction in pain if I hadn't have gone through the physical therapy and been on an antidepressant for a couple of months.
This is like asking "Will there be a cure for chronic being-sick?" - this is meaningless. Chronic pain has innumerable possible causes. Suppressing the symptoms to stuff is not a cure.
At the end of the day, pain is reducible to neurons firing in succession. If you can stop it, interrupt it, filter it or block it, you would have something.
Now I have started waking up in the morning with hands so stiff I can barely make a fist.
The pain doesnt bother me as much as the fear of being doped up on opioids. And the fact organ damage goes along with rheumatoid arthritis.
And to top it off every nut around you says weed or some diet will cure you. It's always cure not maintain or reduce but an outright cure.
Even if that's not the case and DMARDs don't completely solve the problem for you, there's a lot of options before opiods for symptomatic relief. From panadol, through NSAIDs (including the magical COX-2 selectives), and even steroidals.
Don't give up hope too early. Three years ago I couldn't dress myself. Today I just got back from a rock climbing holiday.
He's still quite strong sick as he is and age 76 he lifted and emptied a large bucket of rocks, then complained of shoulder pain. I think dementia and old age are a factor here too, poor judgement. People laugh at the joke "if that hurts don't do that" but it's too true.
He's on a couple of strong pain meds and steroids. He's a bit better now that he started oxygen he doesn't look as pale.
I'm glad to hear you're doing well it's a terrible disease not like there's a good disease. Just make sure to keep an eye on your lungs.
Once in a while it would be great for someone to just respond "that sucks".
I don't buy it. Chronic pain is a thousand different problems and I think it will be solved piece by piece by debugging those individual problems.