HEALTH Hands on Health Caffeine and Arthritic pain?
HEALTH
Caffeine and Arthritic pain?
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- Category: Hands on Health
Q: You have requested I stop caffeine in order to help my arthritic pain symptoms. This is very difficult for me to do, can you be more specific as to why I should comply with this request?
A: Look caffeine up in the Physician’s Desk Reference, you will be shocked to find out what a serious drug it is. When you imbibe caffeine, you do not just wake yourself up but overstimulate every nerve in your body, including pain fibers. Just as important as the biochemical side effects of this element, is where it falls on the scale of alkalinity and acidity.
When a person presents to me with pain that is all over the body, yes they may have all those injuries or compensations for one injury that effects their whole body or they could have a stimulus that is what we call systemic. Systemic means there is input that effects the entire body. For example, if someone is gluten intolerant: the colon gets inflammed, the cells of the lining swell, fermented byproducts leak from the gut and pool in the joints causing pain. Likewise, if someone is eating a diet of mostly acid foods, the joints will be effected systemically; the patient hurts all over. Many diseases and arthritic conditions thrive in an acidic environment. When I have a patient that has inflammed joints and no injury or diagnosis to substantiate them, I have found it very successful to change their diet to more alkaline foods and the arthritic symptoms lessen. For example, avocodo, apricots, hemp milk and quinoa are great alkaline foods. Eggs, milk, coffee, meat and chocolate are acidic. I do not tell patients to eliminate acid all together, just to increase alkaline and decrease acid. To drive the point home. I had a state champion soccer player that was recovering from a femur fracture. Any stimulation of the leg caused severe spasms that interfered with him walking and rehabilitation. We had him worked up for any possible disease process only to come up totally clean. This ended up being good news, it was simple, dietary. He was ingesting mass quantities of cola while playing computer games and no longer sweating from playing soccer. His base line of caffiene was elevated to the point of causing hypercontraction of his musculature. Eliminating caffeine allowed this young man to be totally rehabilitated and return to soccer.
