Dammitol

Voltaren Gel (topical ibuprofen) does it for me before a gig-not sure about daily use and toxicity but has to be better than ingesting it.Fukitol is good in theory but pain sucks...
good luck old fella.

John, I was prescribed Meloxicam. Is it bad news as well? And just to remain on topic, I do occasionally reach for a fukitol, and sometimes fukemol.

I take Meloxicam for the arthritis in my thumb joints. Actually works  

Leadfoot, Guys,
 
My 2 cents on arthritis, meloxicam, life in general… Will toss in some chemical names if anyone wants to explore further thru Wikipedia or the like...
 
I dunno how many types of arthritis there are but they can broadly be broken down to the rheumatoid type or the osteo arthritic complaint. Both are debilitating but the rheumatoid spins are way worse. These are auto immune responses where the body is getting maladaptive signals to destroy itself. The osteo stuff is plain old age wear and tear. Not much more fun as far as pain, but easier to treat especially if caught early on. Think most of us with the condition here are just falling apart from the osteo variety. Thank god for that if nature gave you a choice.
 
The rheumatoid variety can attack everything, take out your lungs, kidneys liver, not just joints. If you can suppress the body’s immune system, kinda like a chemically induced HIV, the symptoms go down with various paybacks depending on the treatment. The NSAID drugs with properties against the “bad” inflammatory cycle has a rational place in rheumatoid therapy if they work in the milder stage of progression. NSAIDs means non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs. They may be chemically dissimilar but share much of the workings of plain aspirin.
 
There’s good and bad inflammation going on inside us. Bad inflammation like a swollen sprained ankle is partly mediated thru a cell surface enzyme called cyclooxygenase-2 or COX-2 (just like the TV commercial says...the one with the geriatric fossil riding a skateboard beside his grandson...). Things like aspirin help inhibit down the road progression to inflammatory mediators and pain signaling by knocking out the involvement of the COX enzymes. Endpoint is some temporary relief from pain and swelling. Really cool for the short term acute crisis.
 
Problem is that there’s also COX-1 which maintains healthy inflammation. Aspirin is the prototype of a non specific inhibitor taking down COX-1 and COX-2 without differentiating.
 
The good inflammation path flogs the stomach and intestines to produce the slimy mucus coating to protect against stomach acid. It also beneficially irritates micro circulation to stay dilated and let blood flow to small and restricted areas. This is critical to the approach of controlling arthritis pain without making osteo arthritis worse because of the treatment choice.
 
You’ve read where a football star sprains his groin and eats a bottle of ibuprofen and wakes up needing a kidney transplant. COX-1 knocked out, blood supply to the kidney micro circulation is cut out and the kidneys rot out overnight.
 
Cut down the mucus covering in the alimentary track and the acid looks at the exposed underlying flesh like a piece of meat. Now you got ulcers.
 
Over time all the NSAIDS, even the safe ones interfere with a common route to produce and set up a balance between prostacyclin and thromboxane. Multi duty stuff dealing with clot formation and protection of the heart from peroxide, ionic, free radical damage. Means if you are on respectable doses of an NSAID, your risk for stroke is increased. Your heart is aging through time faster.
 
Everything in medicine is a risk versus benefit analysis. You take a pill and it does something good at the expense of the bad side effects. The doc has to question whether the benefit you get is worth the risk you are subjected to when you take his prescription to your local Walmart.
 
Want to continue with some thoughts on meloxicam and what you may be using as well for old age arthritis. Some warnings and common sense advice. My better half is telling me to get the hell off the internet and help her weed out the front yard.
 
Be back.
 
John

And exactly like Beep said regarding stretching and getting limber. So important. Yoga my lifeline to battling the clock, or adjusting to the clock in a graceful manner.
 
In my past practice I saw a triad of curses that are there to take us down, outside the normal aging process. Once these take hold, we got so much working against us. Like being flushed and powerless to swim to the top of the bowl.
 
More diffuse is the mental confrontation with our status of impermanence, once we realize we are not 16 years old and not going to live forever. Can cause so much grief and fear that the mental attitude poisons life and we cut our stay short.
 
Inflexibility. We are all turning into biological cement as part of the grand design. Now inflexible joints and nerves are grating on each other sending signals of pain, leading to reduced mobility.
 
Once reduced mobility is accepted, we are down the drain faster than we can refuse to move any more.
 
Still got some stuff on osteoarthritis to pass on.
 
John

When I'm really attempting to do some crazy guit stuff and my body is simply not cooperating I find doing some of the old (light... because I'm a mess these days) standing warmups/stretches from my (short lived) martial arts days. Like "rolling" my shoulders, outstretched arms and doing small to large circles with my hands, doing waist/hip circles, overhead arm stretches and slowed down "kata" strikes/blocks.
 
Although it seems odd to do stretches on other parts of the body to loosen up your hands and forearms it really does help.
 
Yoga, Tai Chi and physio stretches tend to have a lot of overlap. Massage therapy/self massage (giggety) was/is also highly beneficial to me in this regard.
 
I've only had accupuncture once and it was on my back (not focusing on my hand/arm issues) but I'd imagine it would/could be quite effective for localized, guitar related pain.
 
Ice and heat are also amazing natural anti-imflammatories when applied correctly (10-15 mins ice, 10-15 mins heat... repeatt only once if necessary and maybe reduce those times for treating your arms/hands because there isn't as much tissue as in your back or legs).
 
Regular scale practice and warmups are massively important and helpful too... but due to my back being my larger issue I generally just noodle around a bit and launch into things because otherwise I'd do my scale regimen and then have to lay down... lulz).

Jyoti.
 
Naproxen was not a good choice for osteoarthritic patients in retrospect, except for the benefit of increased motion and mobility in spite of the masked pain. This is an example of treatment making the actual disease get worse more rapidly over time.
 
Because osteoarthritis has only a minimal inflammatory component, a non specific anti inflammatory does more damage than good. Turmeric is a miracle herb, from ancient past until today. Multiple chemical pathways to defeat inflammatory response. One of the Ayurvedic plants in a 7000 year old compendium along with ginger, asafoetida, etc.
 
Application to osteo wear and tear arthritis in addition to traditional NSAID's would have minimal benefit. Turmeric however useful in a host of other immune disorders when taken at a 2-3 gram level dietary supplement per day.
 
Leadfoot, thank you for your kind words. Got some more to share about this.  Hope will bring the condition and treatment options into a better perspective.
 
John

As my korean neurologist says:  *no ibuprofen! REBOUND HEADACHE!*

Oh great  Now you tell me  Your explanation of old age arthritis is good  Where were you 30 years ago when I needed this information
I always told my patients that they could take their morning aspirin and their ibuprofen at the same time  They are related in the same family They mix well adding even more to stroke prevention
Now I’m responsible for the carnage of stroke victims I have left by the side of the road
Go ahead and dig the knife in deeper How did I fuk this one up
I don’t expect you to have to know this but what is it in the blood with aging that predisposes us to stroke and what is aspirin's role in stroke prevention

John, I'd like your opinion on my morning regimen. I'm taking meloxicam, curcumin, cayenne, cinnamon, glucosamine chondroitin, and armor thyroid. I usually follow up with a couple Tylenol after a couple hours. Any red flags? Thank you so much for your advice!

Leadfoot,
 
Just make sure to take the thyroid supplement about an hour before food in the morning otherwise up to half of the dose is not absorbed. There are a couple yoga postures called the "fish" in conjunction with either the "rabbit" or the shoulderstand that can revitalize connections to the brain and functions of the thyroid and parathyroid. This can over a couple months result in a reduction or even elimination for the need of the T3/T4 supplement.
 
The jury is out on curcumin because of negligible absorption, water insolubility and the rapid metabolic breakdown of what little is absorbed. Almost all of it just passes through the system unprocessed. There is no doubt regarding the benefits of turmeric, either powder or the raw root (plus way less expensive). Personal testimonies about the benefits of the curcumin chemical are out there, but at the same time there are controlled studies that show no benefit once the chemical is refined out of its natural context. This happens so often when we find a plant that has some health benefit. We identify something we think is responsible, extract or manufacture the chemical only to find that the effect is either reduced or in cases harmful. Not as often works the other way though to be fair. Plant extract may be harmful but the extract is safe.
 
Your regimen looks okay.
 
Jyoti, will get back with you on the connection between blood, age, aspirin, cholesterol.
 
John
 

Curcumin is a major chemical in turmeric and responsible for the bright yellow color. Problem often is that the chemical may or may not be the actual beneficial element, and often the benefit is there because of many other chemicals together in the mix of the native plant. We know very little about many of these and call them "alkaloids" which means we recognize that there is some volatile substance but may not have a clue about what it does or what it is there for.
 
Sad political/economic curse of natural plant research is that it costs a lot of money to do it right and you can't put a patent on a plant, unlike a prescription drug that has a couple decades of a patent allowing the researcher sole receipt of the profits. You do a study to find the effects of loco weed and the guy next door starts selling it using your data. Not a lot of incentive to come up with a ground breaking discovery outside of a college chemistry project.

Jyorishvarii,
 
Here’s my take on the info you asked about. Long forking post...It is not a popular opinion for obvious reasons. Better do this and back off before I get busted for spamming the place or starting a flame war. So a series of pieces of a puzzle that should lead to a conclusion if I done presented it right..
 
Okay, regarding stokes and clots, what is the relationship with age…
 
There is probably some significant causality with age itself since all our internal set points start to lose focus over time, but the hemostatic system usually maintains integrity into old age long after other things have gone south and are falling apart. You are progressively deaf and nearly blind. Lungs and kidneys are shot. No teeth left. Bowels can’t move and every joint of the body is frozen with arthritis. But blood still clots like it should.
 
The main culprit in aberrant coagulation is cholesterol overload in a meat eating humanoid. Oversimplified claim but keeping focus on the aspirin/platelet/cholesterol axis.
 
Consider that we are vegetarian, or nearly so by our structure when we look at the bio physiology of other mammalian species around us that we have not yet driven to extinction... Corpse eating came about many thousands of years ago as an adaptation for survival. If we did not revert to cannibalism, we would not be here now. Smart move at the time. We just never got back to our roots, so the curse continues with all the bad karma, ailments, premature aging and premature death. (off my soap box for now…)
 
We didn’t really get our noses rubbed into the crisis of cholesterol damage until the Vietnam war, when thousands of our young kids were being sent back in body bags.
 
Cadavers were at the time on top of the medical food triangle. You can see how they have had to rethink this over time and come up with the new latest and greatest. Autopsies of the kids showed that their arteries were clogged as bad as a person in old age. Big shock and shakeup over what we thought was wholesome and good.
 
Reference the inside of our blood veins. Maybe not us here as we are already screwed up and damaged goods, but of a child not yet sludged shut by McDonald’s burgers. The layer in contact with the blood flow (endothelium) is a miracle matrix with a slickness beyond any teflon we have been able to produce.
 
Reference also the nature of what is in the blood to understand this. We got water and a lot of different chemicals dissolved down to the molecular level and a lot of big chunks of things in the mix speeding around to do various tasks.
 
Blood achieves what is called a “laminar flow” in a pristine condition. All kinds of blood cells, proteins, big stuff being shuffled around hi speed by circulation when the heart beats. The incredible endothelial interface is so smooth and resistance free that everything flies with no turbulence.
 
Reference that the body (liver) produces all the cholesterol we need, and cholesterol is absolutely needed for a lot of reasons. Because we were never meant to be carrion bottom feeders, nature has not supplied us with a feedback loop to cut down hepatic cholesterol production even in the presence of deadly levels of dietary intake.
 
Reference, maybe most important from the aspect of diet. Nothing dietary of plant origin has a single molecule of cholesterol. Everything of animal origin is filled with cholesterol. There are hi fat and lo fat corpses, but no lo cholesterol corpses. Here is where we get into trouble. Fun and frolic for a few decades until payback time.
 
Focusing on stroke, as the corpse load starts to plaque the arteries and veins, some things happen that are not too cool. First the endothelium is covered and the teflon smoothness is lost. Anybody who has seen the scopes of occluded arteries thinks a second time about that raw raccoon waiting for dinner. The presentation is ugly, like corroded sewer pipes with blobs and chunks of cholesterol building up on the walls. If these completely shut closed, like in the coronary arteries, then a heart attack drops like lightening and you are dead. It takes the meat build up of several decades to occlude more than 90 percent of the arteries before you start to feel pain in the chest and just cant breath right any more.
 
Getting back to the problem of stroke and reference to my previous tirade on platelets.
 
In the laminar flow model, we can bounce around thru life bumping into things, fall down, bruise a knee. Things still flow smoothly in the circulatory system with the trauma to platelets being still below the threshold for activation and clot formation.
 
When cannibalism covers the endothelium and the crud builds up into an ugly jagged terrain, laminar flow is lost. Turbulent clashes are happening unfelt in the body even if we are sitting in a chair eating beef jerky calmly watching Oprah. The body is getting the signal that we are being pounded by some excessive force and are probably bleeding to death. Don’t know where it is coming from, but coming from everywhere. Start forming clots to seal the leak.
 
End of the story. Another one bites the dust.
 
Got to say however that all is not lost if one gets right with Allah and abandons their evil ways.
 
There is a point where the cholesterol buildup, which is inflicting an inflammation response on the endothelium causes a terrible union of meat byproducts and your cells to mutate into “foam cells”. Now you done crossed the line. Any swami guru health spa is only going to do so much since you have carved your own epitaph beyond repair.
 
We used to think that cholesterol damage was set. All you could do after diagnosis was to slow down the damage. We since know with a glimmer of hope that the body can somewhat reverse the damage if the dietary patterns are changed to not feed the condition.
 
Got to duck and run after this rampage. I already feel the love.
 
John

Thank you Webbs...