Chronic pain is horrible. stacked with hashimoto's and psoriatic arthritis I've been in a place where I feel like I genuinely just hedonistically adapted to living under horrible conditions. Still went to work, still did fine in terms of actually dealing with my life, but inside I was just consistently feeling like life wasnt just worth continuing in this state. I dont know if anyone without a chronic autoinmune condition can actually measure well how life actually is like with one, people think it's comparable to a cold but it's genuinely closer to cancer. I didnt sleep or eat well, and spent months trying to find a doctor who wouldnt just look at an MRI and prescribe me homeopathic medicine and B12 shots and think I was somatizing or making everything up. The medical system constantly misses the mark on anyone who doesnt have a clearly readable diagnosis that doesnt fit their playbook.
At some point I started reading papers and really getting into medicine because nothing I was being given was doing much. I did that for a while and ended up with a folder of notes. eventually I organized the notes into a document with grades and effect sizes and short writeups. about fifty things on it, mostly supplements and drugs, some protocols, a couple of devices. I made it for myself. the results were kind of nice so I'm putting it up.
I guess part of it was the medical rumination that often does affect people with OCD and in part it's something that I've pulled back on because past a certain point it becomes more of a compulsive act than actual well structured research.
LDN is on there and probably is the thing that has helped me most and probably changed my life. I was being given pregabalin but I realized there's a rebound effect that just makes the chronic pain worse whenever you're off it, and you have to deal with brain fog and long term cognitive decline. creatine, sauna, a bunch of other stuff. some of it I'm on, some of it I ruled out, some I havent tried.
I'm not a doctor, at most I'm a random person that likes reading papers, I am upfront that some of the research was done with AI, but I verified everything myself and . grades are obviously personal reviews on the evidence, some are probably wrong.
A note is that this is part analysis and part integrative work that borders on spirituality and Buddhist practices that probably don't fit cleanly into the whole document. I tried to put more actionable stuff in there and some things just can't be captured by peer reviewed studies. Either way I'm more interested in what someone else thinks about it.
https://zw5.github.io/understated-interventions/
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