Pain, Pain, Go Away!

It was great day of having fun and getting things done: I mowed the lawn, trimmed the collards, cleaned the basement, and went to the festival across the street. I'm tired and a little sore--but what a difference from last year when a few hours' worked rehabbing the garage left me feeling like I'd been run over. Three weeks' chiropractic care, yoga and B. coagulans turned things around. I also started sitting ankle-on-knee more, something I read at Sal Di Stefano's site. He's a personal trainer that Dr. Davis had on the Zoom meeting this week. It seems to help.  Since it's too hot and humid now to sleep well, and I'm too environmentally conscious (read: cheap) to set the air conditioner lower, I sleep in the basement. After five years' living here, the basement accumulated enough crud and clutter to need a good cleaning. I'd put it off for weeks because cleaning and decluttering distresses me more than surgery or a root canal. My mother (a hoard...

Sitting in another doctor's office this week, I wondered if I was on my way to a 17-year bout with diarrhea, like John Nicholson in The Meat Fix . I wondered if this doctor would have any fresh insights. I wondered why Community Health sent me to a clinic 30 miles away when I live in a city full of doctors. This doctor saw that the lab never ran the lab test for ova and parasites as they were supposed to, so she opened the order for the test. After an examination and taking my symptoms, she suggested seeing a gastronenterologist. I countered with a request for a prescription for a gut zoomer test. She looked it up and was skeptical of it and admitted she wouldn't know know to read the results, but she did write out a prescription for it. No way was I going to get scoped and run the risk of ending up like Wolverine , who went in healthy for a colonoscopy and nearly died after getting perforated and needing an intestinal transplant.  Later that day, my stomach felt like it was bu...

It's a bummer when bad things happen to good dieters: weight gain, acne, need for naps, and indigestion in my case. You can go bananas trying to figure what you ate to make things go wrong. I recently had all the things I just mentioned, and I know it wasn't diet. The same diet I normally feel good on hasn't changed recently (except for subtracting dairy). The only thing that has been different over the past month is that my TMJ was acting up from my taking my big, strong, sled-dog wannabe for walks every night. I think the continual muscle strain led to systemic inflammation. Inflammation indicates a mobilization of your immune system; it's a call to arms. Whether the damaged tissue is a result of infection from bacterial invaders, overuse, or physical trauma, the purpose of the inflammation that ensues is to prevent additional damage and repair the damage already done. But what starts out as a healthy response can have adverse effects if it persists for too lo...

My mom is back to normal, able to walk a little with a walker and doing a little cooking. Perhaps because her recent infection is gone and she isn't eating any more hospital food, her blood sugars have gotten low enough that she's decided to reduce her insulin dose. My TMJ pain has been acting up. But last weekend, a friend invited me to her restorative yoga class, and the next day, for the first time in weeks, I didn't need any aspirin. I'm planning to take her class on a regular basis. I had some anxiety that's now gone. I've always been good on the phone, and good on the Internet, but tended to get kind of freaky in person. I was the weird girl in The Breakfast Club. The anxiety defied all reason and most experience. And yet it just evaporated over the past couple weeks. Why? I quit all dairy except butter around two months ago and I'm finally finished healing from my bike wreck. Those are the only things I can think of that happened recently. There...

As of this month, I've been wheat-free (for the most part) for a year, and as of February, low-carb for one year. I'm also approaching another important anniversary: on February 8, it will have been one year since I saw a doctor for a medical problem. Coincidence? No. Up until mid-February last year, I saw my chiropractor for aches and pains in my neck and shoulders. A couple of weeks after my last appointment, I was well enough to skip the treatments for good. I recently thought of seeing my chiropractor again for a minor neck injury. While lifting weights, my neck felt strained, but being stubborn, I kept on and ended up in pain. There was a knot on my spine and a dip just above it, like a vertibrae had tilted on the x axis. It was painful to look left, tilt my head or do the Indian dance move where you slide your head left and right. Having had good results with my neck and shoulder healing on their own after I changed my diet, I decided to see if this injury would do the ...

What if you had severe, chronic neck pain and your doctor didn't have a clue what to do for you? That was the place I was in during my early 30s: typing was agony, I couldn't press the Dictaphone buttons with my left hand hard enough to engage them, and I was too stiff to shimmy in dance class. Most of what I recall of an outdoor performance of a Shakespeare play of that time (the one where they were stuck on an island) regards squirming around trying to get comfortable. (If you were sitting behind me, I apologize.) A friend referred me to a chiropractor, who diagnosed two pinched nerves in my neck and between my shoulders. Nothing was torn or fractured, and IME, when that's the case, doctors who practice traditional Western medicine won't be able to diagnose anything. That's not to say you shouldn't see an M.D. If something is torn or broken, they can help where a chiropractor and the treatments I'm going to talk about cannot. After several chiropractic tre...

A new job and a svelte new figure: what could be a better reason to buy some new togs? How about a shoulder that's as strong and free of pain as it was at age 18? When I was that age, I carried around 20 pounds of photo equipment for a job that lasted three years. After that, I carried 20 pounds of textbooks around a large campus for four and a half years. By my early 30s, I had chronic neck and shoulder pain, sometimes severe, sometimes niggling. I took to carrying a backpack instead of a purse to lighten the load on the shoulder. Besides seeing a chiropractor, which helped a lot, I learned yoga neck stretches from the book Yoga for Americans written in 1959 by Indra Devi. I learned to pop my neck--loudly--at will. Without the exercises, I'd have needed a lot more trips to the chiropractor. In the past few weeks, without thinking about it, I've been carrying my backpack on my left shoulder--the one that bore the textbooks and the photo equipment for seven and a half years...