Pain is Information. The Trick is Decoding it.
I generally don't take pain killers, neither OTC meds nor prescription meds. Studies show that taking pain killers delays healing by a day or more, unless you are in such severe agony that the pain itself is a source of extreme stress.
In a nutshell, pain killers post surgery or similar can be useful to get extreme pain down to bearable levels and support the healing process. but otherwise pain killers actively interfere with healing.
Instead of taking pain killers, I have learned to try to decode what the pain is telling me about what my body needs so I can get to the root cause of why I am hurting.
One type of headache tells me a coffee will help support my healing process because hexavalent chromium is being dumped from my brain. Another type of headache tells me peanut products, like peanut cookies or Reeses's cups, will get me nutritional support for the pituitary that I need.
Skeletal pain, including low back pain and dental pain, generally suggests I need bone marrow support. General malaise can suggest I need to take a walk to help my body process out lymph at a higher rate of speed.
This wasn't always how I handled things. I kind of stumbled across this approach when I spent a year at death's door and spent about 3.5 months bedridden as part of that.
I'm not a big drinker. My mother gets violently ill from alcohol and my father was a very heavy drinker at one time, so I grew up in a family with a weird attitude towards alcohol. It's equally acceptable in my family to drink heavily or to not drink at all.
So there's not a lot of judgey emotional crap tied to alcohol in my mind, so I don't usually drink because I don't like alcohol and don't tolerate it well. I seem to be more like my mother in that regard than my father.
But that year I began having a nightcap regularly to help me sleep because I was in constant agony and having nightmares so bad that I was afraid to sleep and be alone with my dreams and alcohol helped. After a while, I was regularly drinking a total of four shots of Kahlua as part of either a mud slide or a Kahlua Cappuccino -- two drinks, with an extra shot of liquor each time as part of dinner.
Kahlua seems to be the only alcohol I tolerate well. Even so, I prefer it in iced beverages to minimize the taste.
I was also taking a hot bath most days to help ease the pain because doctors weren't really treating me. I was kind of left to my own devices while they ran tests and suggested that my fear that I might die was evidence of a mental health issue and offered to refer me to a shrink.
I was also doing some other home remedies and at some point I coughed up tremendous amounts of phlegm after a home treatment and I was promptly no longer bedridden. It took me years to regain my strength and stamina for anything resembling a normal life, but I stopped being bedridden from one day to the next following coughing up so much phlegm.
That year, I hallucinated conversations with the Grim Reaper regularly and one day he "left." With that, I knew I would live. The death watch was over.
I had not been trying to survive, much less get better. I was pursuing palliative care and just trying to reduce my suffering in the face of a death sentence and little to no treatment by doctors for sometimes shockingly long stretches while they ran more tests.
But alcohol, hot baths and the home remedy I was using were killing the pain because they were treating the root cause of my pain. They were killing infection and redressing some other issues.
I've never gone back. Treating pain by trying to figure out how to resolve the underlying cause of the pain has become my standard and often boils down to "Time to eat/drink X."
If you are in pain, in many cases, your body needs a particular nutrient or nutrients to support some process and isn't getting what it needs. If you can figure out what you need and consume it, the pain typically plummets pretty promptly.
Also, people are shockingly bad about not staying adequately hydrated. Most days, I wake up feeling not so great and it gets much better as soon as I get something to drink in me.
In a nutshell, pain killers post surgery or similar can be useful to get extreme pain down to bearable levels and support the healing process. but otherwise pain killers actively interfere with healing.
Instead of taking pain killers, I have learned to try to decode what the pain is telling me about what my body needs so I can get to the root cause of why I am hurting.
One type of headache tells me a coffee will help support my healing process because hexavalent chromium is being dumped from my brain. Another type of headache tells me peanut products, like peanut cookies or Reeses's cups, will get me nutritional support for the pituitary that I need.
Skeletal pain, including low back pain and dental pain, generally suggests I need bone marrow support. General malaise can suggest I need to take a walk to help my body process out lymph at a higher rate of speed.
This wasn't always how I handled things. I kind of stumbled across this approach when I spent a year at death's door and spent about 3.5 months bedridden as part of that.
I'm not a big drinker. My mother gets violently ill from alcohol and my father was a very heavy drinker at one time, so I grew up in a family with a weird attitude towards alcohol. It's equally acceptable in my family to drink heavily or to not drink at all.
So there's not a lot of judgey emotional crap tied to alcohol in my mind, so I don't usually drink because I don't like alcohol and don't tolerate it well. I seem to be more like my mother in that regard than my father.
But that year I began having a nightcap regularly to help me sleep because I was in constant agony and having nightmares so bad that I was afraid to sleep and be alone with my dreams and alcohol helped. After a while, I was regularly drinking a total of four shots of Kahlua as part of either a mud slide or a Kahlua Cappuccino -- two drinks, with an extra shot of liquor each time as part of dinner.
Kahlua seems to be the only alcohol I tolerate well. Even so, I prefer it in iced beverages to minimize the taste.
I was also taking a hot bath most days to help ease the pain because doctors weren't really treating me. I was kind of left to my own devices while they ran tests and suggested that my fear that I might die was evidence of a mental health issue and offered to refer me to a shrink.
I was also doing some other home remedies and at some point I coughed up tremendous amounts of phlegm after a home treatment and I was promptly no longer bedridden. It took me years to regain my strength and stamina for anything resembling a normal life, but I stopped being bedridden from one day to the next following coughing up so much phlegm.
That year, I hallucinated conversations with the Grim Reaper regularly and one day he "left." With that, I knew I would live. The death watch was over.
I had not been trying to survive, much less get better. I was pursuing palliative care and just trying to reduce my suffering in the face of a death sentence and little to no treatment by doctors for sometimes shockingly long stretches while they ran more tests.
But alcohol, hot baths and the home remedy I was using were killing the pain because they were treating the root cause of my pain. They were killing infection and redressing some other issues.
I've never gone back. Treating pain by trying to figure out how to resolve the underlying cause of the pain has become my standard and often boils down to "Time to eat/drink X."
If you are in pain, in many cases, your body needs a particular nutrient or nutrients to support some process and isn't getting what it needs. If you can figure out what you need and consume it, the pain typically plummets pretty promptly.
Also, people are shockingly bad about not staying adequately hydrated. Most days, I wake up feeling not so great and it gets much better as soon as I get something to drink in me.
