Painopolis Painopolis

Can’t sleep because of chronic pain? (And wondering if weed might help?) Get our new book, Cannabis Lullaby: A Painsomniac’s Quest for a Good Night’s Sleep. Available in print, ebook, and audiobook, it’s brimming with real-world, evidence-based answers. The author is Painopolis co-host David Sharp, an award-winning health journalist who nipped his pain-fueled insomnia in the bud. Buy a copy today at: painopolis.com/cannabis-lullaby/







Our toolbox:



Check out the following sponsored services we use and love.



Please support Painopolis:



Did you find this episode worth hearing? If so, kindly donate to Painopolis.







We appreciate it! Your donation allows us to keep bringing you great stories, strategies, and insights.

_____________________

While bedridden with Lyme, Kelly Weintraub set the goal of hiking the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail. Could this wildlife biologist claw back her health?

Previously on Painopolis, wildlife biologist Kelly Weintraub talked about the years of symptoms that mysteriously would come and go. Fatigue. Muscle cramps. Migrating pain. Brain fog. Finally, a chance encounter with a colleague whose wife had long confronted the same symptoms led Weintraub to figure out what she was battling: Lyme disease. Lyme is a bacterial infection primarily spread by ticks. But ticks can transmit lots of other diseases, too, which can trigger disabling consequences. As Weintraub, unfortunately, found out.

“Six months after finishing her antibiotics treatment, Weintraub hit the Pacific Crest Trail. Would the little bloodsuckers she’d encounter in the wilderness zap her with even more tick-borne infections?”

Ten months into a controversial antibiotics regimen, she found out she had two more nasty tick-borne infections—anaplasmosis and bartonellosis. That’s why she was still sick, despite taking antibiotics for so long. Some experts say as many as 50 percent of Lyme sufferers like Weintraub—the ones who weren’t treated within 30 days after being infected—stay sick long-term.



But Weintraub beat those odds. In a big way.



While bedridden, she set the pie-in-the-sky goal to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. Six months after finishing her antibiotics treatment, Weintraub hit the trail. Would she be able to walk 2,650 miles with a heavy pack on her back? Would the little bloodsuckers she’d encounter in the wilderness zap her with even more tick-borne infections? In this episode, Weintraub gives us a detailed map of how she went from the sick bay to the summit of her life.



Today, in part two of the story, Weintraub talks about:



• Her strategy for never missing a dose of her meds when her daily pills filled six pillboxes



• The mental shifts she made to deal with the roller-coaster nature of Lyme disease



• Why she believes that setting big goals for herself when she was super-sick was a key part of her recovery. (While bedridden, she decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail!)

Can’t sleep because of chronic pain? (And wondering if weed might help?) Get our new book, Cannabis Lullaby: A Painsomniac’s Quest for a Good Night’s Sleep. Available in print, ebook, and audiobook, it’s brimming with real-world, evidence-based answers. The author is Painopolis co-host David Sharp, an award-winning health journalist who nipped his pain-fueled insomnia in the bud. Buy a copy today at: painopolis.com/cannabis-lullaby/







Our toolbox:



Check out the following sponsored services we use and love.



Please support Painopolis:



Did you find this episode worth hearing? If so, kindly donate to Painopolis.







We appreciate it! Your donation allows us to keep bringing you great stories, strategies, and insights.

_____________________

The most dangerous creature Kelly Weintraub ever came across was as small as a poppy seed. But its bite infected her with a ticking time bomb of chronic ailments.

Nine years ago, avid outdoorswoman Kelly Weintraub found herself in a scary and unfamiliar place: a wheelchair. A wildlife biologist, Weintraub thought she was having a stroke. So she went to the ER, where the doctors told her she was fine. But Weintraub knew she wasn’t. Something was making her sick.

“A chance encounter with a colleague whose wife had long confronted the same symptoms led Weintraub to figure out what she was battling: Lyme disease. But that wasn’t the half of it.”

This was just the latest calamity in a series of health ordeals that had forced Weintraub to go on medical leave. She’d suffered for years from symptoms that mysteriously would come and go. Fatigue. Muscle cramps. Migrating pain. Brain fog. A month after the ER visit, a chance encounter with a colleague whose wife had long confronted the same symptoms led Weintraub to figure out what she was battling: Lyme disease. But that wasn’t the half of it.



Known as The Great Imitator, Lyme disease mimics other conditions such as multiple sclerosis and fibromyalgia. Lyme is a bacterial infection primarily spread by ticks. But ticks can transmit lots of other diseases, too. There’s Rocky Mountain spotted fever. The Heartland virus. Tick-borne relapsing fever. These, and many others, can trigger disabling consequences. What’s more, new tick-borne diseases are being discovered all the time.



If you think you’re out of the woods because you live far from Tick Central—the Northeast states of the U.S.—circle back to the names of the tick-borne diseases I just listed. Yep, the West and Midwest are flush with ticks, too. In fact, in some places, your risk of getting some of these other tick-borne diseases is greater than getting Lyme disease, which is found throughout the U.S. and in more than 60 other countries. (Indeed, Weintraub lives on the West Coast.) Living in a leafy suburb—or hiking in the woods—can potentially jeapordize your health these days.



Even if a tick makes you sick, good luck trying to get an accurate diagnosis. Why? For starters, tick saliva has an anesthetizing substance in it. Less than half of people bitten by a tick recall the event.

Can’t sleep because of chronic pain? (And wondering if weed might help?) Get our new book, Cannabis Lullaby: A Painsomniac’s Quest for a Good Night’s Sleep. Available in print, ebook, and audiobook, it’s brimming with real-world, evidence-based answers. The author is Painopolis co-host David Sharp, an award-winning health journalist who nipped his pain-fueled insomnia in the bud. Buy a copy today at: painopolis.com/cannabis-lullaby/







Our toolbox:



Check out the following sponsored services we use and love.



Please support Painopolis:



Did you find this episode worth hearing? If so, kindly donate to Painopolis.





We appreciate it! Your donation allows us to keep bringing you great stories, strategies, and insights.

_____________________

After a horrific fall from a roof, Bob Jester needed opioids to get through the day. Then he found something better than pills: the pain-fighting power of VR.

In the time it takes to tumble off a roof, Bob Jester’s life took a calamitous turn. A professional chimney sweep, Jester had spent decades working at a job that involved climbing onto high, steep rooftops. Given the obvious danger, he’d always been a stickler about safety. Then one August day in 2016, he made a slight blunder, and that’s all it took. An instant later, he fell 18 feet and broke 19 bones. Surgeons used metal rods and bolts to cobble together his fractured vertebrae. But despite the repairs, he was left with partial disability and intense chronic pain that he treated with opioids.

“Laid out before him was a dreamscape of images far more dazzling than anything on TV. In fact, virtual reality is to television what television is to daguerreotypes.”

Fortunately, this chimney sweep had also worked for 39 years as a high school science teacher. So when he looked for ways to reduce his suffering, guess which method he used? The scientific method. It became Jester’s road map, and his body became his laboratory. Harnessing the same spirit of experimentation that he’d taught to his students, he hit upon a revelatory finding little known beyond the pages of obscure medical journals.



His eureka moment happened while he was wearing a virtual-reality headset, which looks like futuristic ski goggles. But it’s what Jester saw inside those goggles that made all the difference. Laid out before him was a dreamscape of images far more dazzling than anything on TV. In fact, virtual reality is to television what television is to daguerreotypes. No matter how skillful the camerawork, even the best TV documentary about dolphins still boils down to two-dimensional, miniaturized animals moving across on a flat screen. You’d never mistake it for the real thing.



Watch a similar scene through VR googles, by contrast, and you’ll suddenly be surrounded by three-dimensional, life-size dolphins swirling around you, above you, and below you. It’s as if you’re actually there with Flipper and his friends in the ocean. Virtual dolphins look so palpably real that you’ll want to reach out and hand them a virtual fish.



For Jester, the effect of VR wasn’t just entertaining. It was transfixing. Whenever he had a flare-up, he’d pop on his VR headset and suddenly find himself swimming with dolphins. Or flying with the Wright Brothers. Or petting a virtual farm animal. Or wandering the ruins of Machu Picchu. The VR imagery transported him to a world so engrossing that his pain faded ...

Can’t sleep because of chronic pain? (And wondering if weed might help?) Get our new book, Cannabis Lullaby: A Painsomniac’s Quest for a Good Night’s Sleep. Available in print, ebook, and audiobook, it’s brimming with real-world, evidence-based answers. The author is Painopolis co-host David Sharp, an award-winning health journalist who nipped his pain-fueled insomnia in the bud. Buy a copy today at: painopolis.com/cannabis-lullaby/







Our toolbox:



Check out the following sponsored services we use and love.



Please support Painopolis:



Did you find this episode worth hearing? If so, kindly donate to Painopolis.







We appreciate it! Your donation allows us to keep bringing you great stories, strategies, and insights.

_____________________

Can a do-it-yourself treatment involving capsaicin—a chemical in hot peppers—stop severe facial pain? A Nashville-based singer-songwriter decided to find out.

Previously on Painopolis, we brought you the jaw-dropping story of an Australian scientist named Hugh Spencer. He’s come up with daring, do-it-yourself method for treating one of the worst types of pain imaginable: that of trigeminal neuralgia.

“After the ailment took hold, Ruggieri found himself buffeted by more than 200 excruciating jolts of pain in his face every day. It got to where he could barely talk, much less sing.”

Through trial and error, Spencer figured out a way to cure himself of this difficult-to-treat disorder, caused by a facial nerve gone rogue. His secret weapon: capsaicin, the chemical in hot peppers that produces the spicy, burning sensation when you eat them. A neurobiologist by training, Spencer argues that capsaicin can deaden the pain receptors that provoke trigeminal neuralgia while leaving other nerve fibers and healthy tissues intact. Consequently, he insists, capsaicin can relieve the suffering without causing facial numbness or other complications sometimes associated with conventional treatments.



It’s been known for decades that capsaicin applied topically to the skin can help relieve certain types of chronic pain. But Spencer added a daunting new twist: instead of smearing the oily substance on his face, he put it directly inside his mouth on the location of the pain and held it there for 20 minutes before rinsing it out. He then repeated this protocol once a day for a week. After that, his pain was gone. That was more than a dozen years ago, and it’s never come back. Not even a twinge.



Did you find this episode worth hearing? Kindly leave a tip. We really appreciate it. Thanks!



As word spread, trigeminal pain sufferers worldwide contacted Spencer to find out more about his treatment. And of the hundreds of people who’ve tried it and reported back, he says, about half of them found relief.



That got my attention. But I wanted to get an independent assessment about this approach from a trigeminal patient who’s used Spencer’s method and could tell me whether it helped.



To do that, I’d need to find somebody who’s either brave or desperate. That’s because the capsaicin recommended by Spencer is 300 times hotter than Sriracha sauce. In fact, it approaches the intensity of law-enforcement-grade pepper spray....

Can’t sleep because of chronic pain? (And wondering if weed might help?) Get our new book, Cannabis Lullaby: A Painsomniac’s Quest for a Good Night’s Sleep. Available in print, ebook, and audiobook, it’s brimming with real-world, evidence-based answers. The author is Painopolis co-host David Sharp, an award-winning health journalist who nipped his pain-fueled insomnia in the bud. Buy a copy today at: painopolis.com/cannabis-lullaby/







Our toolbox:



Check out the following sponsored services we use and love.



Please support Painopolis:



Did you find this episode worth hearing? If so, kindly donate to Painopolis.





We appreciate it! Your donation allows us to keep bringing you great stories, strategies, and insights.

_____________________

Tormented by severe facial pain, Hugh Spencer invented a nonsurgical way to relieve his trigeminal neuralgia. He found the remedy—capsaicin—inside a canister of pepper spray.

Nineteen years ago, in a distant corner of northeast Australia, a scientist named Hugh Spencer started suffering horrible attacks of pain on the left side of his head. It felt as if someone were striking him with an axe. A neurobiologist by training, Spencer—in his 50s at the time—feared that he was experiencing the first foreboding glimmers of an agonizing ailment called trigeminal neuralgia.

“Spencer’s treatment involves a chemical so ubiquitous that you probably ate it the last time you dined at a Mexican, Thai, or Indian restaurant.”

It’s a neurological disorder that happens when the trigeminal nerve—a major cranial nerve that affects facial sensations and chewing—goes haywire, often for unknown reasons. It then floods the spinal cord and brain with ferocious pain signals. Typically described as electrical or stabbing, the facial pain can be so unbearable that trigeminal neuralgia has been dubbed “the suicide disease.” And indeed, Spencer—unable to control his escalating pain with medications alone—eventually found himself nearly pushed to the brink.



If his medical ordeal weren’t challenging enough, he also had to deal with one other obstacle: geographic remoteness rivaling that of Gilligan’s Island. Spencer runs an environmental research station at Cape Tribulation. There, scientists from around the world study everything from flying foxes to invasive weed species. Located along a coastline teeming with crocodiles, pythons, and ostrichlike cassowaries, his research station is actually closer to Papua New Guinea than to any major city in Australia. In fact, his nearest neighbor is the oldest tropical rainforest on earth.



Did you find this episode worth hearing? Kindly leave a tip. We really appreciate it. Thanks!

After recovering from eight gunshot wounds, Jeff Droke confronts two major dilemmas: chronic pain and a faulty justice system.

Previously on Painopolis, gunshot survivor Jeff Droke described the day in 2003 when a gunman ambushed him at home. Droke was shot eight times in the head, neck and chest. Despite life-threatening injuries, the 44-year-old accountant and professional wrestler tussled with his attacker. Droke ended up throttling the guy so badly that the gunman was forced to flee.

“Just three weeks after the shooting, he was back at the gym working out. But his severe pain didn’t go away; it only went dormant.”

But Droke wasn’t out of danger. While waiting for an ambulance, he nearly bled to death on his neighbor’s lawn. He also had an unforgettable near-death experience. And at the hospital, doctors were amazed that the bullets hadn’t killed him outright.



In the weeks that followed, doctors would be surprised again by Droke’s speedy recovery. Just three weeks after the shooting, he was back at the gym working out. But as he would eventually discover, his gunshot-related pain didn’t go away; it only went dormant. Meanwhile, the police arrested two men and charged them with attempted first-degree murder for the attack on Droke.



Today, Droke talks about:



•  The strange and unexpected way that severe pain came roaring back 11 years after the shooting



•  How he ultimately brought that pain under control



•  What other gunshot-related medical complications cropped up



•  What happened to the culprits involved in the attack



•  How the local justice system bungled any chance he had of getting the justice he’d hoped for



•  Why a gunshot-survivors support group is probably the safest place in town—unless you’re a bad guy



Interviewee:



Jeff Droke is an accountant, gunshot survivor, and gunshot-survivor advocate.



Resources:



•  Droke created shotmemphis.org to serve as an internet resource for Memphis-area survivors of gun violence.



•  Droke’s website was inspired by shotproject.org, another website that addresses the tragedy of gun violence (caution: it contains graphic images of gunshot injuries).



Straight from the lab:



Medical experts have published more than 10,000 articles on the treatment of gunshot wounds. In a sign of just how common gun violence has become, name any body part that’s ever been hit by a bullet, and you’re likely to find published papers exploring the best treatment options for it.



Explore the show notes for this episode at: https://painopolis.com/gunshot-survivor-chronic-pain-part-2/



Music:



Our theme music is “Gentle Storm,” composed and performed by Betsy Tinney (betsytinney.com).



Bonus:



Can’t sleep because of chronic pain? (And wondering if weed might help?) Get our new book, Cannabis Lullaby: A Painsomniac’s Quest for a Good Night’s Sleep. Available in print, ebook, and audiobook, it’s brimming with real-world, evidence-based answers. The author is Painopolis co-host David Sharp, an award-winning health journalist who nipped his pain-fueled insomnia in the bud. Buy a copy today at: painopolis.