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On a personal note, I have found turmeric to be an excellent choice for my sports-related injuries to cure pain and inflammation. I am writing a small thread to highlight my *personal* experiences. https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/magical-anti-inflammatory-properties-turmeric-health-a9195616.html
I run and I lift weights. I was also an active cricketer back in my undergraduate and PhD days. Played for my department for a few years. The very nature of sports means injuries are expected and they do happen. As one gets older, healing takes time and it slows one down.
My frequent flying to far-away places for work and to see family has not helped. Sitting in an airplane for hours and sleeping in bad posture affects the back. It ultimately gave me lower back pain. The doctor prescribed me Diclofenac, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug.
Diclofenac is an excellent drug for back pain. It is usually prescribed with another drug that minimizes stomach ulcers. Slow release ones are the best. This is good only for short term use. In my case, it raised blood pressure by about 15 mm of Hg, a side effect. Felt miserable!
Diclofenac and its other variants such as Voltaren are available as both a sodium and a potassium salt under different trade names. It is also known to kill vultures who eat carcasses of animals that had recently been treated with Diclofenac and it is banned in some countries.
I noticed raised blood pressure only when I visited a health clinic for yearly check-up. I was surprised to see this as I never had high blood pressure of 145/85. That made me a bit concerned and looked at what I had been consuming apart from usual food items.
Diclofenac stood out. Upon reading about the drug, how it acts, and its side-effects, I learnt that it also raises blood pressure. In fact, after I stopped using the drug, my blood pressure went down to normal levels in the next couple of days. I decided to ditch this drug.
About a year ago, I had to go for a mini-surgery to remove a sort of abscess that resulted due to an insect bite while I was running in a forest. I refused Diclofenac to manage surgery pain. Doctor gave me a COX-2 (cyclooxygenase-2) inhibitor instead. COX-2 inhibitor worked well.
Couple of days into the COX-2 inhibitor, I noticed that I could "feel" blood flowing through my veins in my head. It was an absolutely terrible feeling. I checked the blood pressure and it was something like 149/87. Unbelievable! I decided to drop it and live through the pain.
Whilst searching through anti-inflammatory drugs on the internet, I came across curcumin, and its anti-inflammatory effect. A very useful review article is below. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5664031/
Curcumin is a compound that is present in turmeric but it is not an easy one to isolate and its bio-availability is very poor. What the latter means is that if one eats a scoop of turmeric, much of it would pass through the body without producing any beneficial effect.
Being a part-time chemist, I tried couple of simple experiments at home to extract yellow colored curcumin from turmeric - one in water and the other one in olive oil - via heating. Olive oil fared far better in extracting the yellow colored compound (or compounds) than water.
That gave me a starting point of how to use turmeric as a medicine. After I read about much improved bio-availability by adding piperine, a major active component of black pepper, in the article that I mentioned earlier (reproduced below), I decided to "cook" my medicine.
Here is the procedure that I use: Take two spoonfuls of turmeric in a pan. Add just enough water to it so that the solution thus made is thick and slightly runny. Heat the mixture on a low flame for about 3-4 minutes whilst stirring. Add a small amount of water if necessary.
To this hot mixture, add enough olive oil to cover the entire paste and start stirring. Within a 1-2 minutes, one would notice that the color of olive oil starts to change and the whole mixture takes a deep yellow color. Continue stirring further for another 2-3 minutes.
Add freshly crushed black pepper to it and stir for another 2 minutes. If you can take heat easily, then add some more of it. Let the mixture cool down and eat it *together with olive oil*. The last bit is important for the reason already stated earlier.
If you have inflammatory pain, do this once a day and preferably in the morning during breakfast. For me, it has cured nagging pain in the back and also led to lowering of blood pressure and pulse. Just one dose in the morning is enough make me feel good the entire day.
As a caveat, I do want to add that this is my *personal* experience. Whether or not similar effects will be replicated on others is a matter of experiment. But it is well-worth a try if pain medicines affect you adversely.
I am not a pharmacologist but understand certain basic principles of how to make drugs absorbed in the body via the use of (soluble) potassium or sodium salts, suspensions and mixtures. Hence I had to run a simple experiment to see whether water or oil extracts curcumin better.
Instead of olive oil, other oils can also be used. I am used to consuming olive oil and its taste. Hence I adopted it in my concoction.
There are also reports of how to make "Golden Paste" on the web. Also adding turmeric to hot milk and drinking it. The latter uses the idea of milk being a colloid of fat globules. I suspect the fat globules absorb curcumin and hence makes the absorption easy in the body.
END of thread.
