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Wellness Wednesday for July 19, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I’ve posted about before, but I’m constantly dealing with this issue on-and-off that feels vaguely autoimmune:

Joint pain Muscle cramps Muscle spasms Neck and shoulder pain and tension

I found some significant relief through LDN and going lite keto, but some days I’m really floored by it (and it feels like it’s getting a little worse again). I went to a neuro years ago and nothing from Lyme tests to antinuclear came back positive.

I’m pretty afraid I’m treading water with what is an autoimmune issue, but I have no faith in the medical establishment to figure out what this is. Any advice?

I'm had success with some relatively non-specific musculoskeletal stuff with targeted exercise and weekly rapamycin. I have strong inflammatory tendencies and family history, but no diagnosed disorder. Also psychotherapy helped my general improvement, so maybe that too.

Assuming your responses to LDN and keto weren't psychologically mediated (a big possibility -- many of these problems have a psychological component) then rapamycin could help you. It's not an unusually dangerous drug, but not 100% safe either, so ideally you would find an experienced doctor to prescribe and monitor treatment.

For autoimmune, some people respond to heat: get your core temperature to 102F for a few minutes every few days. This is supposedly safe-ish, though didn't work for me. Again, the standard of care involves medical guidance.

Are you sure you're not sitting or sleeping in a sub-optimal position?

If you want to eliminate weird shit:

For the fire fighter friend of mine with random joint pain it was heavy metal accumulation from inhaling a fuck tone of mercury at some point. Went away after a couple months of chelation therapy. (not the woowoo hack type; the real shit at a real hospital.)

Different friend had some sort of allergy to a protein supplement that caused joint inflammation; went away when he stopped supplementing.

Family member with congenital spine deformities she has held off for 70 years by doing hard-core Yoga (vinyasa and ashtanga in the style of a 100 year old dude lookin like he's made of beef jerky who lives in the woods and practices on a rock).

If you are desperate to rule shit out and you got fat stacks, you could try a comprehensive allergy panel. Don't do the online ones, they are garbage that just measure inflammation response which triggers on fucking anything. You gotta get the super annoying scratch and sniff type if you want to really rule shit out.

I had neck, shoulder pain and weaknesses. Self-diagnosed a cervical radiculopathy. GP concurred.

Traction and physiotherapy resolved.

Sounds like you’re where I was at five years ago. I had all sorts of diagnoses from sciatica to nerve damage to hypermobility. Turned out it was all BS and I wasted years and tens of thousands of dollars on pointless medical interventions.

Check out any books by John Sarno, here is an article that gives a bit more depth. There are some other mindbody apps like Curable I’ve heard good things about. You could also look into the Alexander technique school of physical therapy.

I wish you luck. Chronic pain is not easy to live with, and as I’m sure you know most people simply cannot understand.