Inflammation, painkillers
and stomach problems
First versions of this text contained suggestions that were dangerous
for people with severe problems. A friend pointed out the worst of
them. Current version tries to keep to the interesting or safe items.
There are basically two kinds of drugs:
- Painkillers. They don't act on the inflammation process. They
make you feel less pain. These drugs are safe for your stomach and
yield few body problems. But they knock you down mentally, threaten to
make an addict of you and may hide away your inflammation problem a
dangerous way.
- Drugs against inflammation. They act directly on the
inflammation, to reduce it. There are few mental sideeffects but the
drawbacks on the body can be severe, even dead in some cases. Pain,
blooding, even perforation of the stomach and of the duodenum
intestine. Hypertension, bone diseases...
Some new drugs against inflammation yield less stomach problems. Ask
your physician. But the other side-effects keep the same.
Expensive drugs exist to protect the stomach. A friend gave me the name
of a less expensive product to protect the stomach: Docranti.
Drugs against inflammation don't attack the stomach walls directly. The
stomach is being attacked by the chlorhydric acid it produces to digest
food. That production of acid is absolutely normal. Yet it is very
strong. Humans seem to be the animals that produce the most corrosive
stomach digesting substances. That acid can digest just any meat or fat
in a few hours. The stomach itself is meat... yet the stomach walls are
protected by a special protein. And so are the walls of the duodenum
intestine. Other intestines further down don't need that protection
because the acid is taken away during the digest process. The problem
when you take drugs against inflammation is they hamper that protein
that protects the stomach. Without that protection, the stomach acid
starts digesting the stomach itself. That's what causes pain, even
bleeding or stomach perforation.
The problem is not whether the drug is present in your food. But
whether it is present inside the blood while the digestion process is
going on.
I suppose an immunity process is necessary for the stomach to keep
tough against the digestion acid. So, when a drug is taken against
inflammation, which lowers the immunity activity, the stomach gets
brittle. One way to reduce the problem may be to make meals with food
that do not require your stomach to produce acid. That are meals of
starch and vegetables (bread, rice, potatoes...) without any sort of
proteins or fat (no meat, no cheese, no butter, no oil, no nuts...).
Fruit are glucids too but they are often quite acid, I simply don't
know if that can yield a problem. When planning to eat proteins and
fat, maybe you can stop the drug hours in advance, so your blood
contains few of the drug when your stomach becomes acid. (Ask your
physician before trying out such things.) Eating well cooked proteins
with not too much fat and no glucids will yield a quicker digestion and
require less acid. I suppose if you go on taking the drug continuously,
but make a meal of proteins and fat only in while, you will get less
problems anyway. This is theory. (Stress can make your stomach produce
a lot of acid, whatever you eat. So learn to eat.) Techniques exist to
make the stomach let its content flow sooner.
I used to have inflammation problems, though of a different kind than
arthritis and other such severe inflammation problems. I've no more
inflammation problems, simply because I started to separate starch from
the other two kinds of food. One possible explanation for this is given
by the proponents of Low Carbodydrate regimes: the starch rots in the
intestines and this produces toxins. Those toxins trigger the
inflammation or hamper the immunity system to operate correctly. If fat
and especially meat is eaten together with the starch, the rotting
process will produce way more dangerous toxins.
Basically, inflammation is a most healthy process. Inflammation is part
of the body immunity system. It occurs wherever an infection takes
place or a wound has to be healed. That second function, healing a
wound, is most important in our case. The inflammation is due to the
fact the blood vessels swell in order to bring nutriments and immunity
cells faster. A healing wound is a giant building site, where billions
of several different types of cell re-construct everything and wipe
away what should be removed. The inflammation hurts because the local
nerves are stimulated. This annoying side-effect is meant to be good
too: because it makes us avoid to hurt the healing place. By lowering
or stopping the inflammation, drugs also hamper the quality of the
healing. Athletes who took such drugs while they were healing a muscle
problem got awful results: their muscles got not repaired and stayed
fragile. Now the problem with arthritis, emphysema, asthma and the like
is a permanent inflammation takes place though it is useless. In that
case it has to be stopped, of course. By taking drugs or by doing
anything that can decrease immunity activity. One thing I observed is
the problem of inflammation can be solved also by doing the opposite:
by enforcing the immunity. I believe that's because this allows to make
it stop doing odd things. Indeed a weak immunity does not necessarily
mean less immunity activity. Rather it means anarchic activity. That's
why enforcing the immunity can be a better solution than decreasing the
immunity. Herbal drugs allow for this, as well as better management of
stress.
Yet another approach is to consider the immunity causes problems to the
body because it has no other enemy to battle. A new technique currently
being tested with success against asthma implies to inoculate the
person with a mild sickness. So the immunity system starts to battle
against the bacterias of that sickness and just forgets to cause asthma
problems. Statistically, children who grow up in a "sterile"
environment are more likely to get asthma. So having pets decreases the
risk for the children to grow up and get asthma problems. Because pets
yield all sorts of bacterias. Maybe this could be effective for
arthritis and other problems too but I heard nothing about that yet.
Many chemicals can increase the risk for unwanted inflammation. For
example silver ions and dioxins. Maybe study your environments for the
prensence of such products. In some cases, taking pills of one ion
avoids the body assimilating another ion. I heard of somebody who had
problems with lead. He was prescribed zinc and this solved his
problems. There wasn't enough zinc in his diet, hence his body made the
mistake to use lead instead of zinc. This is one kind of reasons why
people switch to organic food
It seems chronic inflammation could be the result of the buildup inside
the body of acids and toxins. The acidity in the small intestines would
be a key to this. I wrote a text on the subject: Body acidity.