Herbal News Magazine

Pain management remains a challenge in the medical field today.  Injuries, disease and medical conditions that cause pain, whether it is acute or chronic, need to be addressed with a multi-faceted approach instead of just medicating the patient with pain pills.  For all of the advances in medicine in recent years, effective pain management is still elusive.

Treating pain with medication alone may lead to dangerous painkiller addictions (like the major oxycontin addiction problem) and tolerance levels to the pain medication.  The incidence of accidental overdoses on prescription pain medication has been continually on the rise.  Pain does need to be addressed and what is causing it since that is our body’s way of indicating that something is not right.  But sometimes only narcotic painkillers will do and more natural methods of pain relief are simply too weak.

It does serve a purpose for our survival.  Managing pain is so important as it causes major loss of functionality to the individual.  Productivity can be lost leading to disability and disturbances in a person’s psychological and social well being.

Because of the high incidence of overdoses and abuse of prescription pain medications, the regulations on the number of pain pills doctors can prescribe have tightened.  In medical schools, more emphasis is being placed on chronic pain management for their medical students.

Pain tolerance and thresholds vary from one patient to another.  Physicians need to listen to each patient as an individual and try to assess their situation for pain management and how to treat it.  There is a variation also dependent on the age of the patient for pain pills effectiveness.

Younger patients will build a tolerance to pain medications sooner which will make it less effective sooner.  Older patients may take longer to excrete pain medications.  All of these variables need to be considered.

Acute pain, such as the pain experienced with kidney stones or burns, needs to be taken care of right away.  If it is not, pain can linger long after the initial condition has been resolved.  For acute pain, as occurs with an injury, short term pain medication should be prescribed.  This practice should avoid the possibility of an addiction occurring after the initial injury.

Other means of treating pain are physical therapy, psychological counseling, acupuncture and sometimes massage therapy.  There is an emotional component to pain with an accompanying anxiety that should not be overlooked or downplayed by the medical profession.

Even when a physician can not find a cause for a patient’s pain, that pain is still very real for that patient.  It can still cause a disruption in that individual’s social and emotional health. The new emphasis on the complex nature of pain management in medical schools is a step in the right direction for medical students.

A simple writing of a prescription for pain medication is not adequate and can have serious consequences of possible addiction or overdose.

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I’m a big believer in massages. I think touch is a huge part of the healing process for the human body. Human beings need to be touched. This has been proven time and time again in studies. Without touch, babies do not thrive and sometimes can even die because it is so powerful.

There is a real healing power in touch. Not only that, there is a greater healing power in trained hands that know how to manipulate the muscles and nerves that get punished on a daily basis by stress, contortion and the various other ways we twist and turn our body out of alignment.

I have serious back pain once in a while, stemming from two car accidents I was in when I was younger. I have soft tissue damage and I’m sure some of my vertebrae were thrown out of wack as well.

I also sit at a desk job all week, and happen to have a very demanding and stressful job (the majority of the time). All of this combined makes for a mess of a back and neck at the end of the week. As a relief measure, I signed up with a massage therapist to get massages for a set price per month, so I do go try to get them once a month.

I get deep pressure since I have some pretty seriously tight muscles when I go. Even though some people may find deep tissue massages somewhat uncomfortable or even painful, for me they are the only thing that works to get my knotted, tight muscles looser for a week or two.

After a massage, I feel like my anxiety is definitely lower, and I have a sense of calm and peace. Since the environment where I get my massage feels warm and safe and also plays relaxing ambient music, this only adds to the whole sensory experience and makes for a very therapeutic session that stays with me throughout the rest of the day.

I swear even my skin looks younger afterwards, which leads me to believe the claims that massage can be a great anti aging weapon.

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We’re picking up where we left off, on something I feel is a very important topic which affects millions of lives every day across the globe. I’m talking about depression, and the havoc it can play on lives when it sneaks in so insidiously as it often does and ruins chances of happiness and contentment.

We’re continuing our talk about natural antidepressants, of which there are a great many to choose from today – lucky for us!  There are several herbs that have some degree of effect on the human mood and the brain chemicals that dictate the human mood.

We talked about sceletium last time, now we’re going to talk about a few others.

St. Johns Wort – this one is probably the most well known of the natural antidepressants.  It has the effect of raising the level of mood as well as promoting a sense of well being and calmness since it can also work to reduce anxiety, which is often associated with depression.

You do have to be careful with this one. You cannot take it if you are already on an SSRI drug, and there is some evidence that it may reduce the effectiveness of the birth control pill in women. So just use caution.  You can start your dose off small if you are not in one of these risk groups, and gradually work it up to whatever works for you.

I have taken this one for long periods of time with good results, and have not had any negative side effects.  The next one I’m going to go over though, I did experience some negative side effects and recommend you research this one before even trying.

SAM-e – this is short for the long name of this supplement which is S -Adenosyl methionine.  This is a nutrient that is already made by and present in the human body, but the levels of it decline with age. I tried this supplement for some mild mood depression years ago and did not like the way it made me feel.  It gave me a pounding headache and increased my anxiety ten fold and made me feel as if I were going mad and I was just out of my head the whole time, and that was on the lowest dosage available, so I never tried it again.

It can be a great way to lift mood for some people, you just really need to watch your dosage of it and make sure you constantly monitor how you feel with various dosages.  For my money, St. Johns Wort has been the most consistent natural antidepressant for me.

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When it comes to fighting depression, there are really a lot of medications out there vying for our attention. However, most of the pharmaceutical options that are on the table come with quite staggering side effects.  Also, they can often lead to a lifetime of prescribed medication taking since they are difficult to ween off of.

Not that some herbs can’t be the same way, but at least you don’t have to get a prescription for them and you also don’t have to worry about trying so many of them and spending a lot of money before you find one that works. It is estimated that the average depression case takes up to three antidepressant medications before they find one that works, so keeping the cost down, and taking something natural is something that eases a lot of people’s minds.

Let’s face it, we all struggle with blue moods once in a while. It doesn’t meant we all need to go on Prozac!  So let’s get on with the subject of this post, which is all about the options out there in herbal medicine that exist for helping to treat mild depression, anxiety and blue moods, all of which pretty much go hand in hand.

Herbal remedies for Depression – the Natural Antidepressant

1.)  Sceletium Tortuosm – This one is relatively new to a lot of people here in the US, but it’s been around a while.  Like the uber popular diet aid hoodia gordonii, it is a succulent plant that is found in South Africa.  It can be chewed, brewed, ground up and basically done any way you want it. It is available in capsule form as a ground up powder as well, but it’s still relatively hard to find here in the US last time I checked. I’m sure that’s about to change once news catches on about it.

This herb is a pretty potent natural antidepressant and mood brightener. It can also boost clarity and mindfulness while also improving overall mood.  Those are all traits that we want to improve in ourselves, so it’s a great way to get a sort of three in one supplement.

It works as a natural SSRI (Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitor), so it helps to increase the amount of serotonin circulating in the blood, which is the feel good chemical that we can be deficient in. Deficiency of this chemical can lead to bulimia and depression.

It also helps dopamine to circulate more efficiently and affects the natural chemicals that help this one to work together in harmony with all the other hormones and chemicals that make you feel good, productive, and happy.  A noted potential side effect is headache in some people.

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First off, let’s talk about what PFC’s are. They are chemicals that are used to make non stick pans more slick so that food does not stick to them. They are used in a variety of other consumer products as well where they have a lot of close human contact, such as stain resistant clothing, so they are pretty pervasive in today’s consumer goods.

Alarmingly, these chemicals have been found in humans just like a barrage of other chemicals.  Even more alarmingly, children who tested with high levels of this chemical showed that they had weaker, more compromised immune systems. This suggests that these PFC’s may actually play some role in depressing the immune system in children, who are often still developing immunities to several types of flus, colds and other viral infections.

You may be confusing PFC’s with another common chemical that invades the human body easily as it is in a great many consumer products – cups we drink out of, cans we eat and drink out of and a lot of things we touch which we then absorb – BPA’s. Both chemicals have destructive effects on the human body and should be avoided with as much care as is possible without making life too hard.

These chemicals are fluorocarbons, and not only are the associated with lower general immunity and immune response in children, but they generally are considered to make vaccinations less effective.  Not sure that makes complete sense, and to be quite frank I don’t support most vaccinations anyway, just my personal opinion, but apparently PFC’s has this negative effect on their effectiveness.

You may remember hearing the term “fluorocarbons” before. Remember when it was all the rage to go from aerosol cans to pump?  This was the age when hairspray and giant hair were in back in the eighties?  Well, fluorocarbons were given lots of attention back then due to their ability to destroy parts of the ozone layer, which has been depleted over the years in part due to environmental pollutions caused by these chemicals.

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