Pain free 1-2-3! A proven program to get patients pain free

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  Jan, 2005  by Jacob Teitelbaum

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I can summarize what I was taught about chronic pain in medical school in two sentences. Use Tylenol and/or SSRI (Motrin-like) medications. If the patient has cancer, you can use narcotics if you have to. It is no surprise then that pain patients flock to alternative therapists so they can get relief. Fortunately, most chronic pain can now be effectively treated.

Pain is not the enemy

Pain is often simply an important indicator of underlying problems that need to be taken care of. In fact, pain can be viewed as the red, flashing, warning light on your dashboard telling you that something urgently needs attention.

Because of this, although chronic pain can be devastating, it serves a critical function. It tells you when you need to avoid something (or some activity) or pay attention to something so that you do not cause damage to your self. In addition, it tells you when your body is not getting something that it needs (e.g. sleep, nutrients, oxygen, etc.).

So we know that pain is not the enemy--it is an important protective system. To simply mask the pain with medication would be like covering up the "low oil" warning light on your dashboard because it was annoying you. Therefore, in addition to teaching you how to turn off the pain signal, we will also help you to understand what the pain is trying to tell you that your body needs. When these are addressed, the pain usually goes away! While the underlying problems that need attention are being addressed, it is also very important to turn off/mask pain so that the patient is comfortable.

So how do I turn off the pain signal?

You turn off the pain by giving the patient's body what it needs and by eliminating what is damaging or toxic to their body. For example, one of the most common types of pain is myofascial (e.g. muscle) pain. Although we might think that muscles will go limp or loose if they do not have what they require, consider rigor mortis. When someone dies and the muscles are not getting what they need, they do not get loose--in fact they become stiff as a board. Using fibromyalgia as a model for widespread myofascial pain, our research team did a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study treating sleep, hormonal deficiencies, infections and nutritional deficiencies. (1) The average improvement in quality of life was 90%, and pain decreased by over 50% on average. (P < .0001 vs. placebo for all 4 outcome measures). Most of the benefit was seen by 100 days into treatment. The majority of patients no longer even qualified for the diagnosis of fibromyalgia by that time! In addition, an editorial in the Journal of the American Academy of Pain Management noted that our treatment protocol was an "excellent and highly effective part of the standard of practice for the treatment of fibromyalgia and myofascial pain syndrome." The full text of our study and the editorial can be seen at www.vitality101.com. You'll be amazed how even pain that has lasted decades can go away quickly when these problems are taken care of.

The wonderful thing about Comprehensive Medicine, which combines holistic and pharmaceutical treatments, is that you have a full tool kit to deal with these problems. Otherwise, it's like going into a shoe store and having only 1 or 2 pairs of shoes to try on. Fortunately, using Comprehensive Medicine, there are literally many dozens of both natural and prescription treatments to try, and when one doesn't eliminate the pain, the others usually will. Almost everyone can find "a shoe that fits" so that they can be pain free and get their life and health back.

So how do I treat the underlying problems causing the pain?

There are usually four key areas that need to be treated to eliminate muscle/myofascial pain. It helps to remember the acronym "S.H.I.N." This stands for Sleep, Hormonal support, treating Infections, and Nutritional support. We will review each of these areas and how to treat them. Neuropathic pain also often responds well to metabolic support as well.

Let's review the four key problems that pain is often trying to alert us about:

Nutritional support: First you need to give the body the nutritional building blocks it needs to heal. Otherwise, it cannot even begin to get well. This is critical as pain patients are often deficient in numerous nutrients. The most important nutrients include: a) vitamins (especially B Vitamins), antioxidants and their precursors/cofactors, b) Minerals--especially magnesium, zinc, iron, and selenium, c) Essential fatty acids, and d) amino acids (proteins). There is a product that contains most of the needed nutrients (except for calcium, iron and essential fatty acids) in one scoop of a good tasting powder and one capsule taken daily. It is called the Energy Revitalization System (from Integrated Therapeutics) and supplies an easy and affordable foundation for nutritional support for almost everyone--including those with pain. We have even seen patients' pain go away simply with this nutritional support. It is easy to use and literally replaces the need for 35 capsules of nutritional supplements a day.