Cure Acne, Back Pain, Tendonitis, Depression

Remedies Include Vicks Vaporub, Castor Oil and Anti-Inflammatory Diet

Simple anti-inflammatory treatments cure some of the most common health complaints. The big question is why people tolerate the problems rather than applying the readily available remedies.

It seems to me that one reason people don’t simply live anti-inflammatory lives and avoid health problems is that attacking the underlying inflammation by approaches that would have prevented the health problem in the first place, is inadequate for fixing the problem after it becomes established.

Health problems based on inflammation may have many different sources of inflammation. Many dietary deficiencies, for example, contribute to inflammation, so what we eat or don’t eat is a major health risk. Other common contributors to inflammation are dental cavities/infections and inadequate exercise.

Common Symptoms of Chronic Inflammation: Acne, Back Pain, Tendonitis, Depression

I have started to ask casual acquaintances if they have any aches or pains, because eliminating dietary sources of inflammation will be evident in relief of these problems. Common complaints are sore joints and tendons related to repeated use. An example is my barber who complained of pain in all of the tendons used to raise his arms to cut hair. Another friend just had her second child and suffered from shooting pains in the tendons of the arm she used to cradle the youngest when she used the other arm on some task.

Simple Anti-Inflammatory Diet Adjustments Get Quick Results

In many cases, a simple change in diet can lower chronic inflammation enough to provide relief from symptoms. Vitamin D deficiency is probably an underlying source of inflammation of most people in the US. So a simple supplement of 2000-5000 IU per day will have noticeable, anti-inflammatory impact on most people.

I recommended vitamin D and fish oil supplements to a friend suffering from chronic back pain. The back pain persisted, but his acne resolved. He stopped taking the supplements, but after physical therapy relieved the back pain, he returned to the supplements as an acne treatment. Now he has long term relief from all of his pains.

Elimination of Dietary Inflammation May Not Resolve Inflammation Based Health Problems

Health problems that start from aggrevated inflammation, may not be eliminated with resolution of the initial cause. My friend’s back ache, for example, didn’t respond to just elimination of deficiencies in his diet. It seemed that the back problems were self-sustaining. After he did exercises to remove the physical aggravation of his back, lack of dietary inflammation prevented the return of the back ache.

Complex Inflammatory Webs

A student of mine suffers from celiac. This is a complex autoimmune disorder of the intestines that is triggered by wheat gluten and is self-perpetuating. Of interest in this context is that celiacs frequently also have back problems. This indicates that the inflammation of the disease is systemic and impacts other tissues. Clearly, reducing dietary inflammation can go only so far in relieving this complex web of reinforcing sources of inflammation.

Simple Anti-inflammatory Interventions

My friend with tendonitis from holding her child got immediate relief from topical application of castor oil and dietary supplements eliminated the problem. Castor oil and capsaicin react with skin heat-sensing neurons to initiate an anti-inflammatory response in adjacent tissue. In a similar way, menthol acts on cold-sensing neurons and relieves pain by reducing inflammation. Vicks Vaporub is a common commercial source of menthol (other sources are blue Listerine mouthwash and Noxema lotion), which give faster relief than longer lasting castor oil for many connective tissue/joint aches. Exercise is another source of relief for inflammation-based aches and pains.

Health: Combinations of Interventions and an Anti-Inflammatory Diet

Anti-inflammatory drugs, such as aspirin, disrupt the molecular signals that produce inflammation and result in relief from inflammation and pain. The common ailments discussed here respond to anti-inflammatory drugs. Depression was mentioned to point out the psychological dimensions of inflammation. Reproduction/birth is controlled at many points by the processes that we call inflammation and the most inflammatory stage is birth. It is not surprising that disruption of the normally rapid resolution of inflammation following birth leads to postpartum depression. It is surprising that postpartum depression can be relieved by anti-inflammatory drugs.

Fighting Inflammation-Based Diseases

Complex diseases such as allergies, asthma, arthritis, vascular/heart diseases, inflammatory bowel diseases, cancers, etc. are all based on chronic inflammation, but they are also self-reinforcing inflammatory diseases. Cures will require elimination of sources of chronic inflammation, e.g. diet, plus disruption of the disease-supporting inflammation, e.g. food/gut flora-stimulation of inflammation of the bowel.

Fundamental to the cure of all diseases is a supporting anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyle.

Is a Belly Bad?

A protruding midsection can mean many different things. It can be obesity, starvation/kwashiorkor or sarcopenia. It can mean there is a layer of fat outside, sagging organs poorly supported by weak abdominal muscles or fat surrounding the organs and stretching the muscles outward.

Alternatively having the same “lean” profile at 60 as at 16 could be a sign of a decline of muscle and an increase in fat surrounding organs. You can always have a porthole put in to see what is going on, or you can check the calendar and your C-reactive protein level.

If you are over fifty and your doctor has told you that your CRP, a measure of inflammation, is starting to creep up, then you are starting to suffer from age-related loss of muscle, sarcopenia. That is, you have begun to replace your muscle mass with fat, and the fat is producing inflammatory signal molecules, cytokines, that are the same as those produced by your immune system cells in response to an infection.

Most of the symptoms we associate with aging are just poorly managed chronic inflammation, as a result of replacing muscle with fat. The fat is metabolically lethargic, so you actually need less food, as your muscle mass declines. The result is that it is progressively easier to put pounds on. That is the bad news. The good news is that building muscle requires at least one of the inflammatory cytokines produced by fat, IL-6, so gaining muscle should be easier until you get back into shape. Losing weight is also anti-inflammatory, if the loss is fast enough to produce a fasting physiology.

All of the diseases associated with increasing age are just the accumulation of problems that result from increasing levels of chronic inflammation. Most of the increase is the result of inflammatory diet, but the increasing inflammation also decreases the desire to be physically active, with the result being a loss of muscle mass. Adjustment to an anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyle, can reverse the aging process.

It is also possible to be physically active and have a youthful muscle mass, but still have an inflammatory diet. The result will still be chronic inflammation, and cryptic inflammatory diseases that accumulate with time and produce sudden failures of joints, coronary arteries or cancer. Estrogens are also naturally anti-inflammatory, so women will find that menopause reveals any inflammatory diet/lifestyle that has been hormonally camouflaged. Thus, menopause may produce any of the typical signs of inflammation, e.g. acne, depression, back problems, arthritis, etc.

The bottom line is that a weak gut and/or extra body fat will cause problems at any age. And at any age, the diseases that are associated with inflammation can be minimized or avoided by an anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyle/exercise.

Menstrual Pain is Inflammatory

Inflammation is essential to the menstrual cycle. At key points inflammatory prostaglandins are made from omega-6 arachidonic acid to trigger ovulation and menses, the discharge of the blood-engorged lining of the uterus. Chronic diet-based inflammation can result in disrupted ovulation, infertility due to an inability to suppress an inflammatory response to egg implantation, menstrual pain/cramps and premature birth.

Several studies have shown that reducing diet-based inflammation by eating supplements containing long chain omega-3 oils, e.g. fish oil, decreased menstrual pain and cramps. The reduction in chronic inflammation was associated with decreased production of inflammatory prostaglandins that are the cause of the pain and intense uterine contractions. Normally, the diet would provide a balance of omega-3 and -6 fatty acids, which would yield a mixture of anti-inflammatory and inflammatory prostaglandins, and produce an effective discharge through more moderate uterine contractions.

A more recent evaluation of numerous studies on the impact of omega-3 oils on pain associated with menstruation, arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, etc., showed a uniform decrease in inflammation and pain. The simple summary is that an inflammatory diet rich in omega-6 vegetable oils leads to pain, suffering and premature aging. A more normal diet with a balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids leads to health and reduced aging.

Typical symptoms of an inflammatory diet are: menstrual cramps, infertility (gestational problems: preeclampsia, prematurity), joint pain, back pain/sciatica, acne, allergies, asthma, autoimmune diseases. There is increasing evidence that obesity not only produces inflammation, but that an inflammatory diet can lead to obesity. An inflammatory diet, especially if augmented with antibiotics, disrupts the normal gut flora and leads to an inflammatory replacement flora that supports chronic inflammation throughout the body.

Chronic inflammation and much of the damage caused by chronic inflammation is reversible by a shift to an anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyle (described elsewhere on this blog.)

references:
Deutch B. 1995. Menstrual pain in Danish women correlated with low n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid intake. Eur J Clin Nutr. 49(7):508-16.

Goldberg RJ, Katz J. 2007. A meta-analysis of the analgesic effects of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid supplementation for inflammatory joint pain. Pain 129(1-2):210-23.

Bell RF. 2007. Food and pain: should we be more interested in what our patients eat? Pain. 129(1-2):5-7.

Inflammation Causes Disease

Human diets have changed dramatically over the last few hundred years, and as a consequence so have our diseases. The most recent shift in diet over the last hundred years has resulted in a shift from infectious diseases to degenerative diseases. This trend is summarized in the following Wikipedia entry.

Lifestyle diseases, from Wikipedia:

"Lifestyle diseases (also called diseases of longevity or diseases of civilization) are diseases that appear to increase in frequency as countries become more industrialized and people live longer. They include Alzheimer's disease, atherosclerosis, asthma, cancer, chronic liver disease or cirrhosis, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, nephritis or chronic renal failure, osteoporosis, acne, stroke, depression and obesity.

Death statistics in the United States
In 1900, the top three causes of death in the United States were pneumonia/influenza, tuberculosis, and diarrhea/enteritis. Communicable diseases accounted for about 60 percent of all deaths. In 1900, heart disease and cancer were ranked number four and eight respectively. Since the 1940s, the majority of deaths in the United States have resulted from heart disease, cancer, and other degenerative diseases. And, by the late 1990s, degenerative diseases accounted for more than 60 percent of all deaths.
Reference:
National Center for Health Statistics, National Office of Vital Statistics, 1947 for the year 1900 (page 67), for the year 1938 (page 55)."

My point here is that all of the so-called lifestyle diseases are also based on inflammation. I checked the research literature for studies of the response of each of these diseases to diets supplemented with omega-3 fish oils. Studies had been performed in each case. Reduction of inflammation by fish oil treatment was uniformly effective in reducing symptoms of all of the degenerative diseases. Other diseases that can be added to the inflammatory list are spinal disc problems and hypertension. It is interesting that disc dislocations are associated with coeliac, an inflammatory/autoimmune disease. It is also interesting that acne and depression are listed. Acne is indirectly associated with diet, but if sufferers shift to an anti-inflammatory diet, acne symptoms disappear. Depression associated with childbirth is particularly responsive to anti-inflammatory drugs, diet and exercise. Most of the symptoms associated with aging are just due to inflammation and are similarly responsive to anti-inflammatory lifestyle changes

To summarize:

• Modern degenerative diseases are caused by modern inflammatory diets (and insufficient exercise.)
• Anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyle reduce degenerative diseases.
• Aging is predominantly mismanaged inflammation.