Back Pain & Arthritis - 012

SPEAKER A The following program presents principles designed to promote good health and is not intended to take the place of personalized professional care. The opinions and ideas expressed are those of the speakers. Viewers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the information presented. SPEAKER B Welcome to healthy living. I'm your host, Margot Marshall. Pain can be horrible, and if it's prolonged or frequent, it can significant impact on the quality of our lives. Are there lifestyle practices that can reduce chronic pain such as back pain and arthritis? Stay tuned. SPEAKER C Healthy Living is a 13 part production of Three ABN Australia television focusing on the health of the whole person, body, mind and spirit. You'll learn natural lifestyle principles with practical health solutions for overall good health. SPEAKER B Joining me in the studio, we have Jenifer Skues, a health psychologist, and Dr. John Clark. Welcome to Jenifer. And welcome to you, John. Thank you for joining us in this program. And pain really is just something that can really spoil lives and be very, very challenging to the person suffering and the people who love them. So would you like to lead off and want to hear some solutions today, if there are some for people about pain? Thanks very much, John. SPEAKER C Personally, I'm allergic to pain. SPEAKER A I think many people are. You're not alone. SPEAKER C And our story today comes from the United States. A lady came to some of my meetings where I was giving a presentation on back pain. This lady had had pain since she was in what we call junior high school, 7th and 8th grade. She was on muscle relaxers and narcotics during that time. And then she graduated, she got married, she had her first child, but during the pregnancy she couldn't be on all these muscle relaxers because babies don't need that kind of drugs. And so she spent her entire pregnancy in and out of bed doing physical therapy exercises so that she could endure her back pain. She went on to live a life where she started her own business doing seamstress work. And she would often work in the garden on the weekend for an hour or two. But it would give her back pain that would keep her from being efficient in her work. During the week, when she got into her sixty s, the pain was getting worse. And so she decided to go for medical help. She had an MRI scan of her back and she went and saw a spine surgeon. He offered to do a big spine surgery where he would take out multiple discs, put in titanium discs, put rods and screws in her back. And not long after having this consult with a spine surgeon, she came to my meetings unbeknownst to me, and didn't even talk to me that I ever recollect during that time. But she came to this topic on back pain, where I present all the principles of why people have back pain and what they can do about it. Lifestyle wise, to fix it. Well, I came back to that community six months later, and she made an appointment to see me. And I often see patients on the go while I'm on the road just to give them advice. Well, she came along and she wanted to tell me her story. And so we sat down and she told me this story about junior high as I've related, and she says, you know, when you gave that talk on back pain, I decided, okay, this probably won't work, but I'm going to give it a ten day trial. I'm going to try your program for ten days. Okay. Here's a lifetime of back pain starting. Yeah. SPEAKER B I was just working it out. If she was in like 1314 somewhere, there early teens, and now she's in her 60s, what's the math? That's more than 40 years. SPEAKER A Many years of suffering. SPEAKER B Most of her life. Yeah. SPEAKER C And so we sat down and she said she had decided she'd give it a ten day trial, and she did. But after seven days, she's feeling so good, she decided, I'm going to go work in that garden. She worked in the garden for 4 hours wow. With absolutely no pain. SPEAKER A Wow. SPEAKER C And the next week, no pain. And when I saw her at six months, no pain. And so by changing her lifestyle, she had changed her life and she'd gotten back her life and she'd gotten over her back pain. SPEAKER B That's amazing. I'm very, very, very interested to know what you told her, but before we do, I'd like to hear a little bit from you, Jennifer. SPEAKER A Okay. Well, I do have a lot of clients who suffer back pain, and it's a very difficult thing for people. It impacts their life because they get depression, anxiety, their high stress levels. They don't sleep well because of their pain. So we have sort of multiple disorders. But there are a number of things I've found out or realized about what causes the pain or why it's maintained. And it isn't always the injury. There are things like what we call cellular memory, where the body has a memory, and when a blow has happened to the body or you're in an accident and there's pain, the cells remember it. And then further down the track events that are similar to because that memory is triggered by the five senses, so it might be the sound of an accident. The body responds with that same pain and people don't connect it. And I have a very good example of that. Many, many years ago, I went overseas and I was given a smallpox vaccination. And if anyone's had one, they're very painful. But I had a really bad reaction and was very sick for a while, and they use a little pin prick and that didn't heal. It took a long time, few weeks, to really sort of calm down. And twelve months exactly to the day for a number of years, it would flare up. And I knew that because I checked my passport, because I thought, well, I had that last year, and then it happened again. So it was a number of years before my body's memory disconnected. That pain factor. SPEAKER B That's amazing. SPEAKER A And I didn't understand it then, but now I understand is that every cell has a memory. SPEAKER B Yes, I've actually heard that from Dr. Arlene Taylor talking about cellular memory. It's quite fascinating. SPEAKER A It is. SPEAKER B John, do you want to give us some of the strategies that you gave to this lady that helped her? SPEAKER C Yes. You see, when you're dealing with back pain, you're dealing with a big problem that has to do with blood flow. A lot of times the blood going to the spine is not sufficient. And so what we're doing when we start targeting the lifestyle factors that will help, we're helping improve blood flow. We actually have this saying in lifestyle medicine that perfect health depends on perfect circulation. And if you doubt that, try stopping circulation. Health decreases rapidly. But many people don't realize that when you have half enough circulation, you probably have half enough health. And so that's the area where we've worked to improve the circulation. So for her, for my program that I set out in the lecture, I had them drink a lot more water. A lot of people don't keep the blood vessels full of fluid if they're only half full. They're more concentrated. And it takes water to help wash out inflammation and improve circulation. The next thing that the program depends on is good exercise. You see, if you exercise, you pump the discs in your back. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER C Studies have been done on these discs showing that if somebody eats a meal and then just sits down, the food particles never make it into the disc. But if they get up and walk around, they pump the discs, and then the nutrition will make it to the center of the disc. You see, discs don't necessarily have blood vessels going through them. They depend on nutrition coming in from the outsides through diffusion or soaking in, as we might say. SPEAKER A Okay, that's something I didn't know. SPEAKER B All right, so that's adequate water, hydration, and then exercise. SPEAKER C Exercise. SPEAKER B Those two things. Is there more? SPEAKER C And the exercise should be periodic. And so I have them get up in the morning and take a walk. Walking is the best exercise for pumping those discs. I had them take a walk immediately after breakfast. It's a good time to walk to make sure the blood doesn't all stagnate to the stomach. I had them walk immediately after lunch for the same reason. And then for the water. We have them drinking water periodically through the day, usually three liters, one when they get up, one 2 hours after breakfast and one 2 hours after lunch. SPEAKER B Right. SPEAKER C And then the food choices that we recommended that I used in that particular lecture, I had them eating a whole plant food breakfast, about half of which would be something like oatmeal, and the other half would be fresh fruit. And then for lunch, lots of fresh green leafy vegetables, lots of salad type things, maybe making up half the lunch, but no oils, no foods that are created through inflammation, through bacteria eaten on the food, as in rotting food, spoiling food, aging food, like vinegar. Some people say, well, but I was told to take apple cider vinegar for my arthritis. And you think, okay, well, some people ask me, wasn't that a good idea? I say, well, why don't you be more natural and just eat the rotten apples? And people realize right away, okay, that is rotten apples, isn't it? What would happen if you took one of those rotten apples and instead of squeezing it into a bottle for vinegar, you threw it in a batch of good apples? What would happen to the good apples? SPEAKER A They go bad. SPEAKER C They all go rotten. So what happens if I eat a rotten apple or take rotten apple juice, otherwise known as organic apple cider vinegar with the mother and put it down here on my salad where it's warm? What happens to my salad? It all goes rotten. And you look on labels, there's vinegar and bread, there's vinegar in salad dressings, there's vinegar and vegenase, mayonnaise, ketchup, tomato sauce. And so people end up causing themselves trouble by eating things that sort of light the fire for inflammation. So the diet was like that. It's very interesting. I'll tell you another story. I had a lady came to me with serious knee arthritis and back pain. She was also suffering from leukemia, okay? She was on narcotics for pain from the leukemia, from the back pain, and from the knee. She was on disability. She had had to quit her job. She was a postal worker. And she came to me with this cancer and this arthritis. And so we set her up on a very similar program, but we made sure she wasn't getting any inflammatory foods in her diet. We had her doing hot and cold showers to stimulate blood flow. And I left that community because I was usually in a community for about two weeks and then would move on to another community to do meetings. And some of her friends called me and said, oh, you wouldn't believe what happened to Dottie. They called her Dottie. That was her nickname. You wouldn't believe what happened to Dottie. I said, really? What's going on? She says, she came to our group and she was shaky, she was sweating, she felt like her heart was pounding too fast, and she felt like she's under anxiety. She didn't know what was going on. And then she realized, I haven't taken my morphine in five days. SPEAKER A She was going through withdrawal. SPEAKER C She was going through withdrawal, so there was no pain to trigger her need for narcotics. And so she had totally stopped. And so today she's drug free, pain free. SPEAKER A That wonderful. SPEAKER B Amazing. SPEAKER C And that sort of brings to an important concept here, that there are foods that feed pain and there are foods that fight pain. You eat fried oils, you can expect pain. You eat lettuce, tomatoes and avocados and cucumbers and all the good fresh fruits and vegetables, you can expect pain to be a lot less. SPEAKER A This is to do with inflammation, isn't it? Which foods cause inflammation and stop inflammation, which is a wonderful thing. SPEAKER B Jennifer, you've got a few thoughts and different strategies that can help with pain, and I think one of them was pet therapy, which really appeals to me. I've had pets for as long as I can remember, except until quite recently, but we're not allowed to have them. SPEAKER A But this comes back to really being in the present moment and doing things that connect the body and get the good hormones going in the body. And there's a number of things pet therapy is amongst them. I mean, humor is another one. When we laugh, we produce lots of good endorphins, which are your happy hormones. But they've done an interesting number of experiments on pet therapy, and they found that in one I read about that they were taking a dog into elderly folks home who were often bedridden or in chairs. And they had this older lady sitting in a chair and they wired her up and they did blood tests, and they did the same to the dog. And so they monitored both the dog and the lady, and they found that when she patted the dog and she connected with the dog, that she got lots of these endorphins or happy hormones. And it really helped just to be in the present and feel good. And as well, endorphins decrease pain. So they're a very good antidote to pain. It's like we've been given something in our body that helps us with our pain, and when we get the endorphins going, the pain level goes down. SPEAKER B These endorphins, they're related to morphine, is that right? SPEAKER A I don't know about but that's a natural well, they do say they're like hundreds of times more powerful than morphine. The endorphins are that good at reducing pain. And I found that but the interesting thing with this experiment was that when they measured the dog, the dog was having the same response, the endorphins, which is why it wags its tail. It's almost smiling. So when they both interacted, they both got the benefits. Oh, isn't that it's a wonderful process. SPEAKER B Not just one. SPEAKER A So we do have a natural pain relief. But how many people, when they're in pain, laugh? SPEAKER B They don't, unless they've got someone to make them laugh. SPEAKER A Well, I found that with my father. He was in a lot of pain in a nursing home for many years. And when I'd go in and talk to him and get him laughing after he said, oh, that was so good. I didn't feel any pain. Yes, see, because of this phenomena, completely. SPEAKER B Have their mind taken away from it distracted. SPEAKER A Well, one, it focuses you in the present, but it also gets the endorphins going that bring the pain levels down. SPEAKER B Yes. Do you have any more thoughts there, John? SPEAKER C I had a patient came to me. She was actually a member of a church I was attending, and she would often complain of back pain. In fact, it would keep her from working, keep her from coming to church. And so I was practicing orthopedic surgery back then, and so I invited her to come to my office. Come to my office. Let's check out this pain, see if there isn't something that can be done. And so she came to my office, and we sat down, and I had her fill out a sheet of paper with some facts before she sat down. She just filled the paper clerk full and had written in the margins. Okay. And so I asked her, well, just tell me about the back pain. And how did it all begin? Oh, 30 years ago, I was out on the farm, and my husband made me lift the tongue of a really heavy trailer. He should have known better than to make me lift that. And when I lifted that, I felt something go pop in my back, and I have never been the same again. And the story sort of went on and on between what her husband had made her do, and she was upset. And I'm like, 30 years ago, okay, what didn't heal? Bones heal in three or four months. Ligaments, tendons, and muscles heal in three or four months. What didn't heal? And it's like it doesn't fit physiology. Why is this happening? And I realized with a big story like that, the emotional mental factors was. SPEAKER A To do with the body's pain, the body's memory. Again, every time she thought of a husband, she thought of that event, and the back was going out in sympathy, literally. SPEAKER C That's right. And so I thought, okay, what she needs help with is the mind body connection. So I had a set of audio CDs that were by some psychologists, like Jenny, who cover mind body connection things. And I loaned them to her, and I said, Here, listen through these. Take some time with them, sort of follow what they're saying and see if it isn't your case and isn't helpful. Well, she listened to this, and she was delighted. This is wonderful. This is just it. This is me. And her pain went away. And for three weeks, she cleaned house, she gardened, she planted wildflowers out in the pasture. She did all kinds of things. And then, whether subconsciously or consciously, she realized that that farmer husband of hers didn't give her any attention unless she had some physical ailment to complain about. She got back her back pain, and she got back her attention. And at that point I said, okay, I'm out of here. If I solve the back pain, I ruin the marriage. But all to illustrate the mind body connection is huge in back pain. SPEAKER A There are several things there because one of them is the illness behavior. She found that when she was having pain, he gave her lots of attention, which she wanted. So that kept it going. So that's the illness behavior. You learn to get attention through your illness. And did she ever recover from that or you don't know. You don't know. Okay. The other one is when we have a traumatic event, which is what she had that was traumatic, but she blamed her husband for it. But a lot of the people I deal with actually have trauma where they'll have an injury caused by an accident, for example. So one, they've had the trauma and the back's been injured, then they go and have surgery and they've got plates or screws and rods and all sorts of things, which is highly traumatic, and the whole body doesn't like it. So they have a more complex pain process because it's not just an injury. And some of those were injuries, but they hadn't had like that first lady, she didn't go and get surgery. If she had, she probably would have had more problems because she's got things that are going to aggravate it. So I find I have to help people deal with it in other ways as well. And yes, listening to your dietary principles, I do do some of those and get them onto the right diet and plenty of water. But I have found that in nature, there's the magnesium chloride oil, which is they harvest from the sea and it's a natural it's not a true oil, but it absorbs, but it actually helps to relax the muscles, relaxes and heals the nerves. And it also reduces inflammation. It's an anti inflammatory. So I often get them to do things like rub that on the area as well. So they have extra things that help because they've got this permanent aggravation within their system. The other thing I have to do is help them to release the trauma because they are carrying a traumatic memory from an event. And it's not just in the body, it's also in the mind and the emotions and the nervous system. So then we do some things to help them to allow the body to correct itself. And then, of course, we look at stress management and relaxation strategies. SPEAKER B You say allow the body to correct itself. What do you mean? SPEAKER A When the nervous system reacts to an event and it actually freezes it, it can't release it every time the person has a memory of that event. And it might not be a conscious memory. It might be that person who was in a car accident is out somewhere and they hear an accident nearby and they find their body is starting to react because the body responds to that. But if I get them to realize that's what the body's doing on a conscious level, and then I use the breathing that we have talked about before to slow the heart rate down, even it out, and what happens? It helps the nervous system to release the stress of that event that they've just dialed up. SPEAKER B Could there be unconscious cues, things that they're not even aware of? SPEAKER A Well, there are unconscious cues, but that's where, because it's embedded in the five senses, our memory bank in our brain is the five sense around video. It's not just the twos. It's not just sight and sound, it's all five senses. So it can do with touch, sight, sound, smell, taste. And when an event occurs, all of those senses are embedded with the event. So if it's certain smells around the accident, for example, and they might go to a garage and they smell a certain smell, it can trigger the response. SPEAKER B And we haven't mentioned arthritis. Perhaps we can have a little word about that. SPEAKER C John well, the principles of back pain are the same principles with arthritis. And maybe we'll touch on exercise and arthritis. Some people well, you know, I'm not going to exercise too much because I don't want to wear out my knees before retirement, because I'm going to need them during retirement to walk around and see the world on my pension. But in reality, if you don't use it, you lose it. And what happens with your cartilage? Just like with your discs needing pumped, your cartilage needs pumped. It won't get nutrition to the cartilage if you don't don't use it. Use it. And as you're walking, your cartilage is going pump, pump, pump, pump, and you're getting nutrition to it. And that would also help you understand why we might say weight loss is hugely helpful for arthritis. If you have a pair of knees that are supposed to handle 100, you weigh 200 kg. What do you think has happened to the warranty on those knees? SPEAKER A It's going to run out a lot sooner, isn't it? SPEAKER C It's going to run out a lot sooner and more weight, more wear and tear, more arthritis. And so weight loss is actually hugely beneficial for reducing arthritis. And the symptoms of arthritis you can imagine. If you weighed nothing, how would you have any arthritis on the other extreme of the spectrum? And so our last discussion of weight loss really applies a lot to arthritis as well. Now, in the food section, again, thinking about what foods are good for your cartilage. Your cartilage is made out of collagen. Collagen, if you look under a microscope, looks like a rope, a three strand rope that is wound in a spiral. And it so happens that vitamin C is the vitamin that is needed to make that collagen wind in a spiral. And you may have heard of what happens when you have no vitamin C, the British sailors would get scurvy and so they started keeping something on their ship to keep them from getting scurvy that we give them vitamin C. Does anybody know what that was? SPEAKER B Limes, I believe. SPEAKER C Yes, call them limes. That's right. And so if you are low in vitamin C, you have three times the risk of getting arthritis and vitamin D. It doubles your risk if you're low in it. For arthritis, you want to make sure you get your vitamin D from the sun. Get your vitamin C from good fruits and vegetables. Fruits like kiwi, oranges, lemons, pineapple. And when you're sufficiently nourished, then you're much less likely to get arthritis. SPEAKER B Is that right? Well, isn't that amazing? It seems to always come down to the common denominators, doesn't know the good nutrition, the plant based diet, exercise, water and it just seems to be underlying all of the ailments that we've even talked about, which is pretty much most of them by the time this series is complete. That's really amazing. Dr. Rosemary Stanton is the foremost dietitian in Australia and she said that a diet dominated by plant foods is almost certainly the way of the future, not only for our personal nutrition, but for the health of the planet. Because really we can't sustain the production of animal foods. We really can't now, and it's just getting more so. The evidence is all there. And wherever you turn, whether it's the World Health Organization or the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating or people who've really, shall I say, not controlled by vested interest, if I could say it that way, they will tell you that this is the need. Dr. Esselspoon and Colin Campbell and so on. The evidence is definitely all there. SPEAKER A Magnesium also is a key factor with arthritis and that's why having the right food diet would help that. But depletion of magnesium causes crystallisation at calcium because it puts a calcium in the bones. If we don't have it, then it's going to crystallize and go into the joints. So using again the magnesium oil can help to help with that. SPEAKER B Yes, you were saying that the other day and I've really taken note of that. Thank you for that. Jenny, any more thoughts there that we haven't really covered today? SPEAKER C Another therapy that we'll use for arthritis is charcoal poultices, which might seem like an unusual thing, but I'll give you an example. What we do is we make up a mixture of charcoal and some food thickener that will make it into a playdoh that we can apply over a knee or arm or an elbow or something tasty playdoh. And I had a gentleman who was the camping next to me. We were out in our caravan and I asked him how he's doing? We sat down and talked and he was like in his seventy s and he was still working, driving a flatbed semi. And I asked him well, how are you doing health wise? He said, well, you know, I had arthritis in my knees. All those years of jumping up and down from the flatbed of the truck had worn out my knees. I went to see my primary care doctor, and they sent me to the orthopedic surgeon, and the orthopedic surgeon signed me up for knee replacement. He said, well, then my friends who knew something about charcoal poultices said, well, why don't you try a charcoal poultice? He said, I put a charcoal poultice on my knees and the pain went away. And I'm wondering, why did I sign up for surgery? And so he ended up using charcoal poultices, canceled the surgery, and that was three years later. He said about three times a month he would put on a charcoal poultice to take away the pain. SPEAKER B How would that work? How would charcoal help? SPEAKER C Charcoal pulls out the inflammation so that the knees can recover on their own. SPEAKER B Isn't that such a simple thing to do? Well, that's all we have time for today, but you can view our programs on demand by visiting our website at 3abnaustralia.org.au Just click on the watch button and you can download our fact sheets. Now, if you have a health concern that you'd like to discuss with Dr. John or with Jennifer Skews, send an email to [email protected] . And join us next time for more secrets of healthy living. God bless.