Nondrug ways to prevent or remove joint pain...

Today's Post: Friday, 2-25-2011

This is a tricky area. Short of strong opiate drugs, your attitude is more powerful than many people realize.

A recent study found that people who believe a pain killer will work get good results even if the pill they get contains none.

But, they also got sharply reduced results from drugs that have proven in double bind studies to reduce pain if they doubt the drug will help them.

Given that, here are two ways to prevent or remove joint pain without drugs.

The supplements in the first part may work for you or if you are a bit of a disbeliever in them, they may not.

However, the two things in the second part of this post work for sure and have many other health benefits.

So, I strongly recommend them.

1. There are many supplements that may help joint pain according to some studies.

If you think they will or might work, they may well be worth taking. If you believe there’s no chance they will work, it might be better to pass based on this new study.

I take most of them since I think some work and some might. So far taking those supplements and my other health protecting practices are working and I rarely feel joint pain. I’ve read that’s rare for people my age.

These include glucosamine, MSM, hyaluronic acid, and shea oil supplements sold as FlexNow.

Celery seed extract has studies showing it helps prevent or turn down gout which is a cause of joint pain and damage.

Glucosamine and the shea oil have some studies showing that they help restore or repair the surfaces of your joints. (It also helps that I read there are no known allergies to shea oil.)

Hyaluronic acid helps the shock absorbing materials in your joints stay hydrated which helps them to be effective and more effective than they would be otherwise.

MSM seems mostly to dial back the pain response from what I’ve read and might help to heal damage too.

2. There are two things that are much more certain to work however.

Since they both have massive health benefits in other areas, even if you pass on all the supplements in the group above, you might consider these two methods.

a) People evolved in a time when they got more omega 3 oil in their food than the average American does now. And, because they did NOT eat meat from animals fed corn which is high in omega 6 oils and did not use oils high in omega 6, they got something like a tenth of the omega 6 oils the average American gets now.

Before people got about the same amount of omega 3 & omega 6 oils, a one to one ratio.

Now, many people have 16 to 20 times as much omega 6 as omega 3 in their food and their bodies.

Unfortunately, that cause chronic inflammation which causes heart disease and helps cause many cancers.

And, it also makes an joint inflammation and pain far worse. It’s like pouring hot sauce on them internally -- or pouring gasoline on a fire!

So, if you

stop eating refined grain foods since the grains are high in omega 6;

stop using oils high in omega 6, corn, soy, canola, and safflower and use extra virgin olive oil instead;

eat other proteins besides meat from grain fed animals such as nuts, beans and lentils, animals fed only grass, and wild caught fish (Note that farmed fish do NOT work for this. They are fed grain unfortunately and even worse are very high in multiple pollutants.)

– OR when you eat meat from grain fed animals, you only eat it occasionally and only eat the most fat reduced kinds and trim all the visible fat;

and, you take omega 3 supplements daily from purified fish oil and eat wild caught fish high in omega 3 oils two or three times a week,

-- you will slash your chronic inflammation.

You will cut your risk for heart disease and cancer. But in addition, any joint pain you did have short of that caused by severe damage will get a lot better.

In fact, one study found that just taking the omega 3 supplements, just a part of what you can do, got equal results to taking over the counter pain medications.

Second, an email I got today from the Real Age people notes a study that doing this set of things strongly prevents your telomeres from shortening. That literally slows aging. Since aging tends to produce joint damage, doing this set of things not only reduces inflammation and pain, it helps prevent the damage that causes it by turning off one of its causes!

b) Curcumin from supplements taken from the spice turmeric or eating curried foods often that have the yellow color of the turmeric in them does several super things.

Studies find it strongly preventive for Alzheimer's disease.

It helps prevent many cancers.

But it does even better with joint pain.

It not only lowers inflammation quite a bit, it prevents a kind of excess blood vessel growth inside your joints that increases the damage and prevents repair.