How I Manage My Patients' Pain and Inflammation

What is Pain and Inflammation, what causes it and how to help get rid of them? Below I discuss the steps I recommend to my patients to help reduce their pain and inflammation. This may or may not suit your particular condition or situation but it may give you some ideas about what you can do.

Many of my patients present with pain and inflammation, some of it comes on over a long period of time and others present with pain that happened suddenly and with no warning. The main question is how did it happen and what can be done do to fix it, whilst stopping it from coming back in the future?

Why do we feel pain?

The main role of pain is to warn us of damage or potential damage to tissues such as muscles, joints and skin, similar to a warning light in our car. Pain is real 100% of the time, but isn’t always a good measure of the amount of damage to the tissues. You can have moderate to severe pain with minimal tissue damage, such as a paper cut or if you hit your finger with a hammer. On the other hand you can break a bone and have little to no pain in some instances. 

This variability in pain is caused by many factors, including:

• Previous injury or trauma (body’s memory)

• Fatigue

• Stress and anxiety

• Inflammation

• The condition of your spine and spinal cord ie: degeneration (sensitivity)

• The condition of the affected tissue

• Medication

• Overall health

What is Inflammation?

Inflammation is our body’s response to injury, infection or tissue damage, allowing us to heal and protect ourselves. The immune system will trigger signaling chemicals to recruit inflammatory chemicals, healing proteins and white blood cells to the affected area helping to heal the tissue. Inflammation is the body’s process for regulating and managing the healing response.

Inflammation is a problem when it is unregulated or prolonged and the healing process is never quite completed. Inflammation can be local, ie: in your knee or thigh muscle, or it can be systemic, affecting the whole body. This is influenced by disease processes in your body, gastro-intestinal health, nutrient levels, stress and fatigue. 

Acute Inflammation: This is a short-term response that usually happens quickly after an injury or infection. It's typically characterized by the classic signs of inflammation and helps the body recover. For example, if you cut your finger, the area around the cut might become red, swollen, and painful as your body works to heal it.

Chronic Inflammation: This is a longer-term response that can persist for months or even years. It can be caused by various factors, including persistent infections, autoimmune diseases (where the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy tissue), or ongoing exposure to harmful substances. Chronic inflammation is linked to various health conditions, such as arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, vascular disease, bowel conditions and some cancers. Chronic inflammation can also reduce the body’s ability to heal from any other conditions it may have such as a muscle strain or injury. 

In most cases, the underlying problem has been building up over weeks, months or years and the body can no longer manage the problem on its own and this leads to injury or damage to other tissues because the body can’t keep up with the rate of healing and repair required.

This is when anti-inflammatories such as Neurofen or Voltarin and pain killers such as panadol are used to manage the pain and inflammation. Short term, these medications can be helpful but long term, they don’t solve the underlying problem and cause significant side effects and damage to the stomach, gastrointestinal tract, liver and kidneys. 

How to reduce pain and inflammation

Here are some practical steps to help reduce inflammation, the key is to remove the source of the inflammation, correct any nutrient deficiency and help the underlying physiology correct itself.

1. Reduce food that causes inflammation

2. Increase Food that lowers inflammation

3. Fasting, ideally for more than 12-15 hours p/day, as often as possible

4. Heal the Gastrointestinal Tract (GIT) and restore the normal microbiome (balance of good and bad bacteria in the GIT)

5. Take in adequate quantities of nutrients (vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids

6. Get adequate sleep – 8 hours per night of consistent sleep is important for healing, weight loss and recovery.

7. Reduce Stress – stress will adversely affect hormone levels, sleep, healing, digestion, inflammation and nutritional levels. 

8. Light exercise – walking is ideal for helping with healing, reducing inflammation and reducing stress. Other forms of exercise include swimming or bike riding, yoga, pilates or light resistance training.

If you need more information about each of these steps, please let me know and I can send you an information sheet. 

Signs of inflammation

1. Redness

2. Heat

3. Swelling

4. Skin irritation (often a sign of GUT problems)

5. Reduced movement

6. Pain

7. Increased weight

8. Poor sleep

9. Poor healing

10. Fatigue

11. Auto-Immune disease

12. Insulin resistance/ Type 2 diabetes

13. Cardiovascular disease

14. Gastro-intestinal problems, ie: bloating, indigestion, diarrhoea, IBS, Crohn's,

15. Period pain and dysfunction (including endometriosis)

Some of these aren’t technically signs, they are conditions but they are indications that your body is in a state of inflammation, even if you don’t necessarily have many specific symptoms. This is what I use as a guide to identify underlying problems that may be contributing. 

Medication

It’s important to know that all medications will have some side effects, whether they are obvious or not, so the goal should be to work towards a solution to the underlying disease or condition and allow the medication to manage symptoms along the way. 

Some medications can actually cause the pain patients present to me with, in particular blood pressure medication and cholesterol medication. Some will deplete your body of nutrients such as B vitamins and CoQ-10, leading to muscular pain. You may need to discuss this with your GP or specialist to find out what you can do, if this is the case. Don't just stop taking your medication.

Treatment

The first advice I give, is to look at your food:

Reduce the inflammatory foods such as grains, wheat, barley, rye and oats, sugar, alcohol, processed meat, fried foods and seed oils.

Increase Food that Reduces Inflammation, such as unprocessed food and vegetables, some meat is ok, eggs, fish and avocado which are a good source of Omega 3 oils (anti-inflammatory), and use butter, margarine contains seed oils (this includes avoiding butter blends as they have canola oil to soften them). Avoid burning oils or fats in food ie: over-cooking meat and eggs as the fat will be damaged, creating harmful free radicals.

Fasting - if possible, don’t eat for 12-15 hours, ie: from dinner until mid-morning or lunch time th next day. Even better, try to do an 18 hour fast, just remember to keep your fluids up. A major benefit of fasting is reducing insulin resistance, which can significantly reduce inflammation.

Hydrate - drink enough water to keep hydrated, salt will help your body retain water so don’t avoid salt. Electrolytes often help relieve muscular pain and headache symptoms, indicating that person was dehydrated. 

Repair the gastrointestinal tract - the first 3 steps above will help with this (food, fasting and water), so you’re already half way there. The other important steps include: avoiding any other known aggravating foods, take a good probiotic and in many cases, I need to prescribe one or all of the following:

• GUT Repair Protocol to remove the bad bacteria (ie: SIBO) and replace the good bacteria

• Food Sensitivity Testing - Identify which foods are causing inflammation and how severe the immune response is - this is a blood test

• Concentrated nutrient supplement program

• Liver Cleanse

• Parasite Cleanse

Supplement Program - most people take supplements these days which is generally a good thing, however, getting enough of the right nutrients in both number and dose, as well as taking a supplement with high absorption, is very difficult to get right. This is a whole presentation in itself, however, in many cases taking some supplements is better than none, however, taking individual nutrients is going to significantly limit the body’s ability to heal. A good diet will help, but getting enough minerals is difficult, as our soils are badly depleted and most supplements only have 3-4 minerals. We need approximately 60 minerals each day. 

Sleep - getting enough sleep will help healing and a process called autophagy, reduce stress, reduce inflammation and give your body the best chance of recovering and reducing your pain.

Exercise - light, regular exercise will improve blood flow, reduce stress, accelerate healing and help with sleep.

Stress - this is a major cause of problems I see everyday. Everything is worse when people are stressed and often, patients won’t heal until they can reduce their stress or just allow themslves to slow down. The more things you can do to reduce or eliminate stress, the better chance you have of healing, as well as reducing pain and inflammation. Stress causes the relaese of cortisol (stress hormone) and will also deplete your body of certain nutrients such as Vit D, zinc and B vitamins.

The best thing for most people to do regarding inflammation and pain is to look closely at your food, try fasting (if you can), get more and better sleep, reduce stress, do some light exercise, stay hydrated and make sure you are getting enough nutrients. Healing any underlying diseases, including gastro-intestinal problems as well as working towards reducing medication, when safe to do so, will help target the root cause of pain and inflammation.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me or make an appointment of you’d like to discuss specific health problems in detail.