I wanted to touch on a topic today that can be very distressing if you are suffering with it. As I have not suffered this myself I am going to give you a series of links to people in the field and to relevant support groups which I hope are helpful to you.
We are talking about Arachnoiditis. No it is not about spiders!
This is a chronic condition of the spine.
It is inflammation of the arachnoid layer of the meninges. That is the protective layers found around the brain and spinal cord and it causes severe pain.
I certainly do not want you to try and diagnose yourself from any description I give here but some of the common symptoms may be;
- Weakness and numbness or tingling in the legs
- Feeling of crawling insects on the leg
- Cramps and twitching
- Severe shooting pain
- And/or bladder, bowel and sexual dysfunction.
If you suspect you should go to see your healthcare professional.
To understand and read more about it here are detailed and descriptive articles.
Here are two interesting articles I came across recently I wanted to share with you, you may find useful or interesting and to get your opinion on.
First, did you know that chronic pain shrinks the brain?
Yes, that's what the first article is about.
And I don't know about you, but I can't afford any loss of
brain :)
The second article discusses how you can use nutrition
to help eliminate your pain - or keep it, depending upon the
choices you make.
Ok, so here they are courtesy of The Healthy Back Institute...
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Chronic Back Pain Limits Brain Power
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You don't need to be a scientist to know that chronic back pain can have a negative impact on your life, often bringing with it anxiety and depression. It can affect your ability to work, sleep, and perform other daily activities.
Until recently, it has been assumed that whatever changes occurred in the brain as a result of chronic back pain were only temporary and that the brain would revert to a normal state once the pain stopped.
Recent findings by researchers from Northwestern University have turned this assumption on its head. What they found was that chronic back pain - defined as pain lasting six months or longer - can cause significant and long-lasting damage to the brain, aging it up to 20 times faster than normal.
In fact, chronic back pain actually shrinks the gray matter of the brain - the part responsible for memory and information processing - by as much as 11 percent each year. In contrast, normal aging of the brain results in just a 0.5 percent loss of gray matter a year.
Get the rest of this story here:
(NB This link may not work after July 2016)
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Can Proper Nutrition and Supplementation Eliminate Your Pain?
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Anyone looking to achieve optimal health has to consider nutrition as the single most important ingredient for success. In a perfect world, all of our nutrition should come from the food we eat. Supplementation should not even be an issue.
In the real world, however, most of the foods we eat are riddled with fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and hormones - not to mention that they are often hydrated with polluted water. In addition, an ever-growing percentage of our food comes from other countries, which don't always have the best inspection track record.
And if all that weren't bad enough, the natural nutrient value of the soil that produces these foods has also been diminishing over the years, a trend that will only continue. This is why
it's necessary for us to take a hard look at our diets and make a decision about whether we may need supplements.
As you can see, proper nutrition nowadays is not that easy; it does take some time to educate yourself. By proper nutrition, I mean eating clean and safe foods that have the nutrients your
body requires to get and stay healthy.
Recipe for relief .Your two main purposes for eating a healthy diet and taking supplements are to give your body what it needs to heal itself and to minimize the level of inflammation that is in your body.
The inflammation is what is causing your pain.
Drugs that fight pain do little, if anything, to help the body heal itself. In fact, some of these drugs can have severe negative side effects, so please consider eating right as an alternative.
If you are suffering from any type of back, neck or sciatic pain, there is hope for relief.
I hope you enjoy these two articles. Have a great weekend!
If you liked this post do consider joining our Facebook Page Sciatica Solutions.
Lose The Back Pain System
Lose the Back Pain, is a system of self assessments to determine what physical imbalances you may have that may be causing your pain, then specific and targeted exercises to follow to address the imbalances, along with pain reduction strategies.
For useful information and suggestions there is a Free Back Pain Book Written by the Healthy back Institute-
7 Day Back Pain Cure
This free book (there is a small shipping/handling fee for physical book) will give you a good starting point for taking back control of your back pain covering reasons for pain, pain relief, possible treatments, action plans and many other things you will find useful.
Follow Jasmine Ann Raintree's board Back And Sciatic Pain Strategies. on Pinterest.
