Pain Relief Newsletter September  2003 [ Send a copy to a friend ]   Holistic Remedies For Headaches Frequent headaches can be caused by a vast variety of things!  It is important to know and understand what is triggering your headaches, and what type of headache you have.  So first and foremost... if you have frequent headaches, see your physician.  Pain is a warning sign and is there for a reason. If you make the pain go away and ignore the signal, you could let something that could be treated turn into something that is much more difficult or even impossible to treat. (READ ARTICLE)   Tendonitis - Natural Pain Management Alternative medicine professionals offer tendonitis pain sufferers the option of natural pain management and relief therapies without the risks of surgery and pharmaceutical approaches. Besides being more conservative than the medical establishment's methods of tendonitis pain relief, they're just as effective if not more so. (READ ARTICLE)   Fibromyalgia - Nutritional Support The Journal of Nutritional Medicine published a study on the combined effects of magnesium and malic acid on FM patients.  The researchers used oral magnesium and malic acid preparations in an open clinical setting.  Fifteen patients (ages 32 to 60) ingested 1,200 to 2,400 mg of malic acid with 300 to 600 mg of magnesium for a testing period of 4 to 8 weeks. The results of the study were encouraging:  all patients significant relief of pain within 48 hours of treatment and, within 4 to 8 weeks, all patients had a significant and measurable decrease in the Tender Point Index (TPI).  (READ ARTICLE)   Bowen Therapy and Chronic Fatigue She was diagnosed with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia in 1991.  And it has been a long road for her - going from being a very active person to someone who has to regulate her daily activities. After feeling like a zombie from medications for four years, not knowing if her pain and confusion were really from the chronic fatigue or from all the medications, and being really fed up with doctors who had no idea what they were dealing with, she decided that she had to find a different solution to help with this condition that was totally taking over her life. She finally ran across an article about chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia patients who were receiving massage.  This was something she had not tried.  She got the phone book and called a phone number, and on the other end was a woman who knew exactly what chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia were.  She said she had used Bowen Therapy, a type of massage that is new to the United States, on a woman who had had chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia for many years, and that the woman was now leading a normal life. So she decided to try it.  The day after her first treatment she felt well enough to take  a walk – something that had become difficult to do.  After her second treatment she started feeling an energy that she hadn’t felt for years.  So she began tapering off her medications. By her third treatment she knew she was going in the right direction.  For four years, she had had neck and back pain so badly that she would be in bed for days at a time.  The day after her third treatment she had a terrible headache.  Her Bowen practitioner told her she would have the headache until her body adjusted itself – which it finally did.  After that, she did not have any more pain in her neck or back. By the fourth treatment, her carpal tunnel syndrome had become much improved.  And by the 5th treatment, she was totally off all her medications, her knees stopped hurting, her night sweats had just about gone away and her fevers were gone. She still has days when she knows she needs to get extra rest, but she no longer spends her days with depression, pain and exhaustion.  Bowen Therapy hasn’t totally “cured” her, but after ten treatments and knowing how good she feels, she doesn’t feel so confined to her home and bed any longer.  What a great feeling!  Extend Yourself For Low Back Pain Your back may have "gone out" the moment you leaned over to pet your pooch, but don't blame poor Rufus for the agony you're now in. Most likely, your back has undergone years of abuse as you slouched in front of the TV and hunched over a desk. Though you may hate to admit it now, Mom was right when she pestered you to sit up straight. For most of us, low-back pain is a cumulative process, resulting from chronic poor posture and sedentary habits. A flexed (or hunched over) back is bad news--it can stress or damage the disks that cushion the bones in your spine. Poor lifting and bending habits can also contribute to low-back pain. (READ ARTICLE)   Headache Prevention Cookbook - Book Review Headache Prevention Cookbook Food can't cure headaches, but avoiding certain foods may prevent them, according to author David R. Marks, medical director of the New England Center for Headaches,  Some foods commonly trigger headaches in some people.  If you're a headache sufferer, eliminating those foods from your diet is a sensible second step towards managing headaches.  (The first step is to see your doctor to determine if there is some underlying condition that is causing the headaches.) The key is to go on an elimination diet that avoids trigger foods such as most cheeses, chocolate, nuts, certain meats, preservatives, artificial sweeteners, MSG, caffeine, beans, out-of-the-oven yeast products (e.g., pizza, yeast breads, doughnuts), alcohol (especially red wine), ice cream, olive oil and many, many more.  If you were left to your own devices to figure out what's left after eliminating all these foods, you'd probably give up within a day.  But Lara Marks has done the work for you, putting together 100 recipes that contain none (whew!) of the forbidden foods. The Headache Prevention Cookbook's recipes aren't bland or boring.  They include Hearty Potato-Mushroom Frittata, Crepes with Spinach and Cheese Filling, Eggplant "Caviar," Corn and Carrot Chowder, Linguine with White Clam Sauce, Garlic Chicken, Cornish Hens and Wild Rice with Apricot Sauce, Asian Ginger Beef with Broccoli, Seafood Curry and Angel Food-Strawberry Delight. The authors suggest that you follow this diet, using their recipes and others you create yourself, for at least two months, and see if your headaches go away.  Then gradually reintroduce the foods you avoided, one per week, so you can track which foods are your personal headache triggers.  Once you've figured that out, avoiding those foods permanently can be your ticket to a headache-free future.                                                                                 amazon.com (Joan Price The Gentlest Most Effective Pain Therapy Ever! If you’re suffering from pain in your neck, shoulders, lower back, pelvis or extremities, you can be pain free and experience a full range of motion instantly! And you can enjoy this new found relief without drugs, surgery, supplements or painful needles! Sound impossible? It’s not! In fact, not only is it possible, it’s easy and gentle. What you are about to read is probably the most sensational story about pain relief you will ever read! (READ ARTICLE)   Self Care For Neck and Back Pain The key to recovering from acute back or neck pain is restricting your activity and taking over-the-counter medications, because most back pain is related to muscle strain. In most cases, acute back pain will go away on its own over a period of days. Here are some tips that will help you recover: (READ ARTICLE) Newsletter Archives August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002