Chronic Pain And A New Paradigm

We often associate chronic pain with the back, but chronic pain can also be a daily reality for people dealing with diabetes, glaucoma, arthritis, Fibromyalgia, cancer and many other disease processes. For many, the primary choices for dealing with chronic pain appear to be either narcotic drugs or sheer will power. For others, changes in lifestyle including an improved diet, and appropriate nutritional supplementation, have brought not only the benefit of reduced pain but also improvements in quality of life.

Chronic pain is often associated with tissue damage and inflammation. Unfortunately this is sometimes easier said than diagnosed. Tissue damage can result from a disease process, repetitive stress, or cellular degradation brought on by an absence of quality nutrition and poor lifestyle. Because these effects can be more subtle than the results of an automobile accident it isn’t hard to see why some people dealing with chronic pain may go their entire life without ever knowing the exact source of their discomfort.

In this is understanding of a paradigm that has brought effective pain relief for many. Everything in the body is either made out of cells or made by cells. All cells are capable of regenerating over time. By focusing on what these cells need for proper structure and function, healthier tissues result from healthier cells leading to reduced inflammation, pressure from swollen tissues and a decrease or complete absence of pain.

What do cells need for healthy production? We have known that cells require protein, fats and water to for basic structure. Unfortunately the quality of these components is often poor in our modern diets. This is usually a good starting point for any person wishing to improve their diet. Most people have too much protein in their diets, the quality of the fat consumed is very poor and the water they drink is typically insufficient as well as poor in quality.

Would you buy a car if the dealer told you it was made from the lowest quality parts? Remember that you absolutely are what you eat. Our diets often reflect the diets of our parents, which reflect the diets of their parents. Unfortunately our lifestyles are completely different from a common lifestyle of two generations ago. Very few people today need to eat a massive meal before heading off to work. This is because almost none of us go from a meal to working an entire day at hard labor as many of our recent ancestors did. In addition to the quality of the foods you’re eating, be aware of portion sizes. When you create a burden for your body from a diet of too much food, fewer resources can be spent on other immune system and repair functions elsewhere in the body.

Cells also require carbohydrates for energy as well as vitamins, minerals, and a variety of other phytochemicals including a newly discovered class of carbohydrates, which are used not for energy, but rather as the basis for cellular communication. These are known as glyconutrients. If you’re missing any of these components, or if you are not providing them to your body from high-quality sources, the quality of your cells will reflect that. Improve the sources and you can improve the cells.

The body has an amazing capacity to restore, protect and defend itself from the effects of injury and disease. These processes occur at the cellular level and they require appropriate and sufficient nutritional support. Improvements in diet involve not only the intake of better foods but also the limitation, or elimination, of poor foods. In addition to this, quality nutritional supplementation can help ensure that every cell has the nutrients it needs without the increase of calories we would experience if we simply tried to eat more food in an effort to ingest more nutrients. These improvements are part of a process and the results are not always immediate, but if you begin to take the right steps today you have the same potential as anyone else for better days to come.