Natural Pain Relief and Alternative Healthcare MATTERS (Pun Intended)

Chronic Pain—Beyond the OUCH Kind

If you've got chronic pain and don't want to risk the side effects of drugs, have I got a book for you. As I said at the start of this ongoing thoughts-dispenser I'm setting up, Relieving Pain Naturally is a comprehensive overview of 27 natural, non-invasive Treatments for 37 chronic pain Conditions. Going forward, my role in this space will most probably be to bring your attention to Treatments that have yet to be included in the book. But now, as a way of giving you the whole story of how the book, therefore this blog, came about, I'm going to quote from a speech I gave at my high school reunion in May 2007.

My Personal Pain Story

Two elements came together in my life to form the genesis of this book. The first was a personal pain problem that developed in the 1960s. The full story—what I call a cautionary tale—is that I was thrown from a horse and landed perfectly, flat on my back on the sandy beach out in Jamaica Bay that my friend and I had been galloping along until the horse decided he'd had enough of me. I guess the fall must have softened up my back, because the next week, when I fell down ice skating on Rockefeller Center's very slippery ice after a bibulous pre-Christmas dinner with friends and kids, I felt a sharp shooting pain that started on the right side of my spine just below the hip and traveled down my leg. That pain turned out to be a bulging slipped disc pressing on the sciatic nerve and it required several hospitalizations and traction, but fortunately no surgery.

The second element was a growing interest in alternative ways of dealing with health—and pain—that began flowering a few years later and dovetailed with the need to reduce my pain. About this time, I began thinking in terms of finding my own solutions to problems, and in the early 1970s that quest led me to Hatha Yoga where, after a long period of living with pain, I learned a number of helpful postures, including the spinal twist, that worked perfectly to contain my pain by relieving pressure on the bulging disc at L5 in my spine. For years, this worked as an instant fix and I was able to move on with my life relatively pain-free.

Then, alas, in the 1980s, I did another stupid athletic thing. At my college reunion, I ran a very fast race, coming in second—right behind a much taller, super-athletic woman—which was great, except that, and here comes the stupid part—leading up to this race, I hadn't been running regularly for a long time and didn't do a proper warmup the day of the race, so naturally, my muscles were very stiff. But in those days, the philosophy, no pain, no gain ruled, and it was expected that you just worked through the pain to the other side.

Well, the upshot was that I developed an inflamed plantar's fascia—that's the fibrous connective tissue on the sole, stretching from the front of the heel to the ball of the foot. I limped along with this for months, running only sporadically, until I caved and went to a very busy foot doctor near my job. He was SO busy, in fact—I guess making money to support his fancy wife and cars (he was always talking on the phone about this or that luxury car needing something)—that he really rushed his patients through. He never even bothered to ask if I had any musculoskeletal problems, but just shot me up with some cortisone, wrapped my foot, and told me never to get the bandage wet.

Long story short, standing on one leg in the shower for 6 bandaged weeks totally exacerbated my dormant disc problem and it was all downhill from there on out.

Several therapists later, my plantar's fascia was fine, but my disc was not, and a too-forceful outward rotation of my right hip by another too-busy doctor actually dislocated the hip (I'll never forget the loud cracking noise the adjustment made), leading down the road to the destruction of the cartilage and to bone-on-bone pain.

After visiting five orthopedic surgeons over the next five years, I chose to go with the last one I saw whose sub-specialty was repairing other doctor's mistakes. This justifiably confidant man gave me a cementless hip replacement in the early 1990s that is perfect to this day, enabling me and the long metal pin in my bone to just go on with my life and not look back. The new bionic part fixed the hip pain right up, but due to a combination of ineffective post-op therapy provided by the insurance company and my own neglect of the leg-bend exercises I was supposed to do, my upper-right leg muscles atrophied, and for about a year I listed to the right when I walked.

I finally decided this wouldn't do, so I went to a really good therapist recommended by my surgeon, and he gave me some custom exercises for my specific problem, which I began doing religiously. Yoga was mostly out for the time being—that ban lasted about a year—but, even so, at the same time that I was visiting the exercise therapist and doing his routine there and at home, every morning I was also running very hot water over my upper-right leg muscles in the shower doing a version of the yoga tree posture, right foot upturned on left knee, hands in prayer position over my head for balance, and slowly bobbing up and down on my left leg. In the beginning, I stood there screaming in pain and glad to be out of earshot, but I persevered with my self-developed hydrotherapy-cum-yoga, and in a few weeks, I had my upper leg back in working order and no longer walked listing to the right.

Well, the fallout from that initial neglect is that I now get no grace period—I have to exercise daily or pay the consequences. But this can also be viewed as a GOOD thing, since it gets me down on the floor every day and out walking 4–5 times a week, thereby toning everything up.

Of course, I take my share of responsiblity for the downward spiraling of this saga, but mainly I believe that, given a little care and proper attention by the practitioners involved, this cautionary tale need never have happened.

The What, How, and Setup of the Book

I could go on and on about this, but it's time to move on to the subject I came here to discuss: One aspect of treating the whole body, namely alternative approaches to chronic pain problems, and our comprehensive guide on the subject. I should tell you that back when we started thinking about the subject, pain wasn't written about the way it is now. In just the past few months, I have collected fifteen or so clippings on pain from one paper alone, so you can see that pain is now very much in the public eye.

Before I progress to the book itself, I'll tell you how it came to be written. It's a funny story. Back before the hip operation, one of the surgeons I consulted suggested I start swimming, so I joined a neighborhood pool and stuck with it even after the operation. In the mid-nineties, I was standing at poolside in my bathing suit talking with a man, also in bathing attire. We had been introduced at the front desk and I think I heard the receptionist tell the man I was an editor involved with alternative health books. Since I didn't get this person's name, I was startled when, dripping wet from his laps, as was I, he said to me, "We should do a book together." "Why?" was my rapid-fire response. "Because I'm a pain-management specialist," he shot back. Oh, I thought. Interesting. We've never done a book on pain. (As I said, in the mid-nineties the topic of pain as something to write about was still under the radar.)

So, I took his suggestion to my then boss, who loved moneymaking ideas, but didn't get it about this one. She was definitely underwhelmed, but said she'd pass it by her advisors. They, it seems, were totally focused on publishing a new (to us) vitamin book (that ended up bombing), so they passed on the idea. As I turned to leave her office after getting the negative news, I heard my brain saying, "That's OK, Barbara. I'll take the book and I'll make money.

And several years later, that's just what I did. I got hold of my swimming-pool buddy, Dr. Jeff Perry, who ended up writing the Foreword, and convinced Sylvia Goldfarb (one of our authors—in partnership with a doctor, our company had published several of their books) that we could do very well collaborating on this project. And that's how it all got started, two dripping-wet adults talking shop at the shallow end of an indoor swimming pool on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Guess networking can take place anywhere, can't it?

Before proceeding further, I should explain that Sylvia and I are health writers, not doctors. We both have years of work in the health field, her more as a magazine writer, me mostly as an editor, but we have no medical degrees, although, admirably, Sylvia did go back to school and get a Ph.D. while we were working together. I mention this because neither of us can diagnose or prescribe. That would cause trouble, and no one wants that. What I can do is tell you some therapies and remedies I have personally found helpful, and some that people I know have benefited from. And I can refer you to the relevant sections of our book so you can find out what helps with what condition.

Both Sylvia and I come out of a background of making technical health information easily accessible to general lay readers, so it was important to us that our book be super clear and easy to understand. As we explain in the Introduction, Relieving Pain Naturally is basically a two-part book, divided into Conditions and Treatments. These are preceded by an alphabetically listed Quick Help Chart and are followed by an extensive Resources Section. Each one of the Conditions and Treatments in the book list its own resources, a job that, along with Clinical Studies for every single treatment that can have them (there is, for example, no valid way to do clinical studies on aromatherapy), took me most of one summer to unearth the facts on, and had me saying, someday I know I'll be proud I did all this without a research assistant, but right now—oh boy.

References and a thorough Index follow Resources, and the whole package comes in a two-column format with easy-to read type. Although the book is necessarily an overview, and functions basically as an introduction to all the Conditions and Treatments outlined within its pages, it does contain an enormous amount of useful information nuggets. And I should also point out there is a great deal of original research in the book that will not be found up and down the line—unless we're being quoted, of course.

In keeping with our easy-to-access theme, Sylvia and I cross-referenced between the two parts, briefly outlining the relevant Self-Help Treatments and Assisted Alternative Treatments in each Condition section so the reader can turn to those sections and read about the therapy/remedy in more detail. Then, in each Treatments section, we give a listing of Painful Conditions that Respond Well To whatever Treatment Section is being written about. For example, in the Hydrotherapy section, we list 21 Conditions where this therapy can be useful. Throughout both main sections there are boxes with little factoids of interest, or upbeat case histories of real people that one of us knows or knows about, with only the names changed for the person's protection.

I think the best way to show the books thoroughness and usefulness, however, is to pick an entry and scroll through it. Since our two biggest Conditions sections, Back Pain and Osteoarthritis, are also the most frequently discussed, I'll choose the first, Back Pain, to illustrate the setup for them all.

The entry, like all entries in Conditions, opens with a discussion of the Condition that includes a definition—this is particularly helpful with the lesser known ailments (Trigeminal Neuralgia, aka tic douloureux, comes to mind). Then comes a synopsis of symptoms, common causes, and a paragraph on diagnosing the problem. Before getting on to the alternative treatments, we list the current conventional treatments and then point out the problems with some of these treatments. The next two sections deal with the alternative treatments and are divided into those you can do yourself and those that require specialized training or the aid of a healthcare professional. This particular entry on Back Pain ends with some practical suggestions and a box on an interesting program we learned about.

The template for all the Treatments entries starts with a brief paragraph on just what the particular treatment is about and in the case of one of my favorites, Bee Venom Therapy, what painful conditions it can help. It gives a history of the therapy, discusses how it works, then gives the list I mentioned previously—the painful conditions that respond well to it—and tells what the advantages of the therapy are. It goes on to talk about how it is used—if it were strictly a self-help therapy, it would say how to use it instead. The all-important cautions are listed, followed by clinical studies and, in the Bee Venom entry, three boxes with case histories and an interesting little factoid about a doctor I found who uses it for treating shingles.

This is basically how the book goes. As you might have surmised, we are very proud of our work on it and we think, as people tire more and more of allopathic medicine with its drugs and their too-frequent harmful side effects, Relieving Pain Naturally will find more and more of an audience. Unlike books promoting this or that magic bullet that can fall out of favor, this book contains enough solid information to give it a long long shelf life, with revised editions to be done as needed.