“That told us the brain must have a built-in way of prioritizing urgent survival needs over pain, and we wanted to find the neurons responsible for that switch,” says Goldstein."
There are some books about walking putting illness into remission. A famous one is "The Salt Path" where someone with "corticobasal degeneration" brain disease was positively impacted by their walk. (Although the claims are in doubt now because the main author wasn't truthful about other aspects of their walk)
Anyway walking probably a real positive overall!
Lower: lose weight, get moving, strengthen hips, glutes and calves.
Upper: lose weight, get moving, strengthen chest, lats, core
Mine was because I have the posture of a lump of VERY wet clay.
Also, losing weight helped a lot - less to carry around and hold in the right places.
Eliminated my back pain and led to a bunch of other non obvious life improvements.
I went to physical therapy for two months because that’s all insurance would pay for. My spine was weak and lacked stability. They had me doing stretches for back mobility and core strengthening. I continued that when insurance ran out and added in a lot of walking and other light weights and calisthenics.
It’s been a long journey and I’m only half way to where I was. The worst part is I did it to myself by becoming sedentary for to many years.
"A documentary that follows the largest fMRI randomized controlled trial challenging conventional wisdom about chronic pain, and revolutionizing treatment for millions."
Explains how these neurons get wired to fire when there is no physical stimulus causing the pain. Similar to phantom limb syndrome.
There's a book called The Way Out, which documents the technique used in the study featured in the Pain Brain Film above.
I can fully attest to this technique. It 100% works. I had chronic neck and back pain for 20 years. I thought it was my desk, I thought it was my posture, thought it was my chair. Nope, it was my mind.
This in itself is a very interesting observation. I've always been inclined to fast during times of pain and anxiety, and honestly it kind of works? Could well be part of meditative fasting's popularity throughout history.
I got the idea from a book, and it worked
When I ate again, it came back, but I was definitely relieved of pain for awhile. Thankfully the whole episode subsided after about 6 weeks, but it was comforting to know that I could turn it off by fasting.
For example, most headaches I have - drinking a glass of water usually fixes it.
Maybe feed a cold, starve a fever. And now starve lower back pain?
The bigger opportunity here may be not to dismiss pain as being in the head, but recognizing that when it is, treating the suspected source is not the best route, or maybe not in isolation.
My most effective treatment for headaches is imitrex but you have to time it correctly and I really hate how it makes my body feel.
Due to said age it was VERY hard to find a doctor willing to replace my hip, EVEN THOUGH I had 2 failed repairs, and had to resort to opioids to sleep.
And long-term opioid usage (not abuse!) can cause higher the risk of persistent pain after a total hip arthroplasty.
Thankfully this is not the case for me. But it was a big concern in this journey.
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I have another. Hanging (dead hang) from a pullup bar or staircase. It fixes it. 30 seconds every day, or 3 sets of 30 seconds
EA-3167•6h ago
I certainly hope that this or another path of research leads to a new generation of therapies that don't depend on opioids and are more effective than current alternatives.
tpmoney•5h ago
1) Ever escalating doses of NSAIDs / acetaminophen and the associated long term health effects of that.
2) Long term opioid management which will leave you treated like a drug seeker by anyone who isn’t your pain doctor and may or may not also require long term escalation and has its own health concerns and complicates your use of other medications. And god help you if you don’t like your pain doctor because changing them is a whole different world of suspicion and poor treatment.
3) Various physical interventions like nerve ablations or back surgery or steroid injections which come with a host of other risks and also tend to be both expensive and temporary.
noir_lord•5h ago
hackable_sand•2h ago
petesergeant•2h ago
vjvjvjvjghv•42m ago