When I was growing up, hospitals generally did not have too many options for pain management. Take a look at any hospital today; not only does it have dedicated specialists for every kind of pain control, the specialists are swamped with case upon case of people who suffer from chronic interminable pain in a bewildering assortment of places - it could be the lumbar region, it could be the cervix, it could be the feet - any place where it is possible to have a strained tendon, a damaged muscle, a deformed bone - everything seems to act up today for some reason. The problem is, that the doctors who are trained in pain control have only two kinds of of approaches to use to help people out - stuffing people with addicting painkillers, and carting them off to surgery. Joint replacement surgeries are so common now, you would think people were going in for pleasure. Certainly there is something wrong with this picture. Isn't there something other than surgery or drugs that can be done to help with a painful condition? Isn't there a way to get a little bit of self-help to tackle things?
It turns out that there is; and you could read all about it in the new book Stop Pain - written by the doctor, Vijay Vad, who specializes in helping people manage their pain without doing anything drastic like heading off to surgery or taking on a lifelong prescription of pain medication. According to the book, some of the simplest things you could do, a few minutes of aerobic exercises each day for instance, could help a great deal with pain control. Exercising with a painful condition is quite difficult of course. You take your painkillers, it harms the quality of your sleep, and when you get up in the morning, you're so tired out that exercise seems to be the last thing on your mind. Braving it for the first week or two though, to take a nice 20 minute walk through the tiredness, doesn't seem like it could do much. But it could in reality spell the difference between a ainful drug-filled life, and drug-free pain-free existence.
It can be very interesting the way exercise works for problems like back pain. At first, the pain seems to get somewhat worse when you begin with exercise. But the more you keep pushing the pain with greater amounts of exercise, the more the pain begins to disappear. Feeding the body healthy doses of pain makes it more tolerant, more insensitive to pain, and that is a good thing. Exercise as a form of pain control works with more than just back pain. Arthritis is greatly helped by it. If for instance you have an arthritic knee joint, a certain steady amount of exercise to the knee can arrest the process of cartilage loss. The muscles around your knee can act as a kind of cushion for your body weight. People just stop exercising once they get arthritis, and the muscles around the knee become weaker and less able to provide that kind of support. A little exercise keeps the muscles strong, and keeps your cartilage loss down to a minimum.
A great anti-inflammatory diet also is very important to pain control at home. But what if you have something like migraine, something like fibromyalgia? Can anything help with those? Simple walking exercises can release endorphins into the blood, and help you sleep, and help you with your pain. According to the book, fibromyalgia is overdiagnosed for no reason. There are often simpler explanations to the problems people have that are misdiagnosed as fibromyalgia. So when should you look at these methods of pain control? If there seems to be no relief after you have been to a chiropractor or an acupuncture therapist for a while, and if you've done your exercises for a while and it doesn't seem to help, that's when you need to visit an actual specialist to ramp it up. But short of that, your best bet is to help yourself at home with a certain amount of exercise and a good diet every day.
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