The Nutritional Management of Chronic Pain

Gentle Reader Are you like me, suffering from chronic pain?  Do you wake up every morning and check to see which joints are hurting?  A friend of mine describes sitting on the edge of the bed wondering if she can actually stand and walk to the bathroom.  I’m better off than that, but the first …

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One more injury hiking the Engadin

Gentle Reader, The 3rd and most dramatic day of my hiking-in-the-Alps adventure this past Sept. occurred on day 5.  Pedie Jolly and I left the other two hikers at the Via Engadina junction above Grevasalvas where they would pass the “Heidi” house. We trudged on up beyond the tree line to a high lake just …

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Heart attack? Climbing high

Gentle Reader, How do you survive trekking at a high altitude?  The second day of our Engadine Valley hike in Switzerland began and ended from the little village of Zuoz, a bus and train ride from Guarda where our 1st day ended. No more sciatica or lower back pain.  No more arthritis troubles with Pain …

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Hiking the Engadine: Avoid arthritis pain

Gentle Reader, I am back safe and sound from my hike through the Engadine Valley in the Alps in Switzerland and the Writers Workshop in Villa Lina north of Rome.  And my body is not suffering from arthritis!  Sitting in the airplane for the long flight to Amsterdam, the first stop of my journey, I …

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Here’s where you begin

Gentle Reader, What is the difference between fixing a problem and prevention?  Most of my blog posts consider specific problems developing from pain in the joints caused by traumatically induced arthritis or the age related osteoarthritis and spinal stenosis issues some of us face just because we’ve been moving hard and fast all our lives.  …

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The last word on Consumer Report’s warning against Vitamins

Gentle Reader, This week Dr. Chaney concludes his analysis of the article titled “10 Surprising Dangers of Vitamins and Supplements” in the September 2012 issue of Consumer Reports. The article consists of 10 warnings about the potential dangers of food supplements. The first six of those were at least partially true, but they pertained to …

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Knee Pain: an early warning sign of Osteoarthritis

Gentle Reader, This is just in from the Johns Hopkins: Knee Pain: An Early Warning Sign of Osteoarthritis Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis, affecting an estimated 27 million people in the United States. By age 40, approximately 90 percent of us have at least some signs of osteoarthritis that can be seen …

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How I find time on my “to-do” list for exercise

Gentle Reader, You’re too busy, you say, to exercise.  Here I am at the Shaklee convention in Las Vegas where it is too hot to breath outside and too stale to breath inside the air conditioning.  I’m one of those Northwesterners who lives and breathes in and out nothing but fresh air. We are sitting …

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How about Stinging Nettles?

Gentle Reader, If I could tell you why some days I wake up with no pain whatsoever– like today– and catalog the food I ate yesterday, the stretches I made, the delicious sleep, the supplements, the aerobic activity—why surely I would have a recipe for a pain free life.  I cannot. I cross country skied …

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Go ahead and dig in the garden

Dear Gentle Reader, With the strains of Vivaldi’s 4 Seasons setting the tone, spring has finally come to Seattle. While so many of you are enjoying unseasonably warm weather, we have seen snow flurries, much rain and the thermometer has not climbed into the upper 50’s. Until the last couple of days.  The parking lots …

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