7 Natural Painkillers for Chronic Pain

A true story.

I have been suffering with accute tendonitis for about 18 months. I used to walk for up to an hour a day and decided to start walking with weights around my ankles. However, this may have caused damage to my achilles tendons. I found it incresasingly painful to walk and eventually stoped doing my daily exercise. I thought the pain and soreness would go away over time, but it did not. Fast forward eighteen months I and ended up paying a visit to a physiotherapist. I was told I had achilles tendonitis and was given a series of exercise to do over a period of one month. Unfortunatley, the exercise were making things worse. My ankles were even more painful. I was about to give my physiptherapist a visit when something miraculous happended. I had eaten something which did not agree with my stomach and was in agony. I decided to chew on some raw ginger in the hope that it would qwell my stomach ache. After about an hour the sickness went away.
The next day, I had to run up the stairs after my young niece and as I got to the top of the stairs it suddenly struck me that I was not wincing in pain. The pain I had been suffering from for eighteen months had subsided considerably. I thought to myself, what I had taken recently for this to happen. It could only have been the ginger. I am not saying it has disappeared 100%, but I can now walk without feeling sore and can even run again. I have started taking ginger on a daily basis hoping that finally I have found a solution.
If you are suffering from joint pain and can stomach ginger, I recommend you try it.
I have to caution you. Ginger is not for everyone. please read this article first here first.

6 Common Pain Triggers That Might Surprise You

First of all, I strongly believe that you should be grateful for the pain as your body is giving you powerful feedback that typically some lifestyle activity is causing your disability. Clearly, this is not the case for most traumas, but they are a relatively minor percentage of chronic pain.
Do you know what disease causes your body to lose the sensitivity to pain?  Leprosy. People with leprosy typically die prematurely from serious infections they incur as a result of the loss of feedback from exposure to harmful environmental hot or sharp objects.
1. Emotional Trauma
Few people want to be told that their pain is psychological or emotional in origin, but there’s quite a bit of evidence that backs this up. One theory is that emotional trauma (along with physical injury and environmental toxins) may stimulate molecules in your central nervous system called microglia.
These molecules release inflammatory chemicals when stressed, resulting in chronic pain and psychological disorders like anxiety and depression.⁷ Dr. John Sarno, for example, used mind-body techniques to treat patients with severe low back pain and has authored a number of books on this topic.⁸
His specialty was those who have already had surgery for low back pain and did not get any relief. This is one tough group of patients, yet he had a greater than 80 percent success rate using techniques like the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT).

2. Painkillers

Ironically, the very drugs that most physicians prescribe to treat pain may end up making your pain worse after just a few months of use. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, associate chief of neurosurgery at Grady Memorial Hospital and CNN’s chief medical correspondent, reported:⁹
“…after just a few months of taking the pills, something starts to change in the body. The effectiveness wears off, and patients typically report getting only about 30% pain relief, compared with when they started. Even more concerning, a subgroup of these patients develop a condition known as hyperalgesia, an increased sensitivity to pain.
As you might guess, all of this creates a situation where the person starts to take more and more pills. And even though they are no longer providing much pain relief, they can still diminish the body’s drive to breathe.
If you are awake you may not notice it, but if you fall asleep with too many of these pills in your system, you never wake up. Add alcohol, and the problem is exponentially worse. People who take pain or sleeping pills and drink a couple glasses of wine are playing Russian roulette.”
3. Poor Sleep
Poor sleep can actually impact virtually every aspect of your health, and the reason for this is because your circadian rhythm (sleep-wake cycle) actually “drives” the rhythms of biological activity at the cellular level. Further, your body needs deep sleep for tissue growth and repair, which is crucial for pain relief. According to recent research from Great Britain, poor or insufficient sleep was actually the strongest predictor for pain in adults over 50.¹⁰
4. Leaky Gut
Dietary changes (see below) are crucial for managing pain, and this is, in part, due to the way they influence your gut health. Substances in grains, for instance, may increase intestinal permeability (i.e. leaky gut syndrome), allowing undigested food particles, bacteria, and other toxicants to “leak” into your bloodstream. Leaky gut can cause digestive symptoms such as bloating, gas, and abdominal cramps, as well as cause or contribute to many others symptoms, including inflammation and chronic pain.
5. Magnesium Deficiency
Among magnesium’s many roles is blocking your brain’s receptors of glutamate, a neurotransmitter that may cause your neurons to become hypersensitive to pain.¹¹ This is especially important because an estimated 80 percent of Americans are deficient in magnesium. Two major lifestyle factors that further deplete your body of magnesium are stress and prescription drugs, putting chronic-pain patients at particular risk of deficiency.
6. Lyme Disease
Some of the first symptoms of Lyme disease may include a flu-like condition with fever, chills, headache, stiff neck, achiness, and fatigue. However, it often lingers chronically, in some people for more than a decade, causing muscle and joint pain. Because Lyme and all of its co-infections cause so many constant symptoms, it easily mimics disorders, such as multiple sclerosis (MS), arthritis, Parkinson’s, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and more.
If you’re suffering from chronic pain and don’t know why, it’s worth considering Lyme disease, even if you don’t think you’ve been bitten by a tick (it’s primary transmitter). Fewer than half of Lyme patients recall ever getting a tick bite. Many Lyme patients don’t remember such an event because the tick numbs your skin before biting so it is never felt. In some studies, this number is as low as 15 percent. So, if you don’t recall seeing a tick on your body, that doesn’t rule out the possibility of Lyme disease.

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