Saturday, August 26, 2017

Can You Guess the Top Five Posts on This Blog?

I was hoping today I could announce the second edition of Saving My Knees was out. But alas, while I was downloading it to Amazon's Kindle publishing center, with the new cover and five additional short chapters, Kindle burped up an unfriendly message.

Namely it had found 11 spelling errors.

Now, nine weren’t really spelling errors, but two were legitimate typos, which made me cringe. So I am going to see if my ebook formatter will correct these two, then we’ll be off to the races – for real this time.

Meanwhile, I thought it would be fun, especially for relatively new visitors, to show you the five most popular blog posts I have done. You see, I have access to the dashboard behind this blog, which shows all sorts of nifty details, such as where visitors are coming from and how many views each post has gotten.

The winner, by a long shot, is “If You’re Overweight and Have Knee Pain, You Need to Read This” – 37,363 views so far. Nice!

The others rounding out the top five:

2. Here Are My "Radical" Beliefs About Healing Bad Knees (17,422)

3. "What Should I Do If I Have 'Weak' Knees?" (14,155)

4. Comment Corner: Sleeping Position, Signals From Bad Knees (10,417)

5. Why I think Cycling May Be the Best Activity for Rehabbing Bad Knees (9,220)

One thing I noticed while doing this little roundup: all these posts are from 2011. So maybe, gulp, I’m running out of things to say?

After the second edition comes out, I’ll probably write fewer posts, and just invite people to chat among themselves. It’s always interesting to hear from people out there who are struggling with knee pain, and listen as others try to help them. Thankfully I’m no longer struggling (which is perhaps why I’ve become a bit boring ... ah well).

Saturday, August 12, 2017

Low Dose Naltrexone for Damping Inflammation?

Sometime visitor “Racer R-X” (that’s his full handle, if I recall correctly) occasionally drops a comment below one of my posts.

I’ve maintained for a while that I get the smart readers in the world of knee pain – thoughtful, analytical people who are in full-on search mode for ways to get better. Every time I hear from Racer R-X, I’m reminded of this.

He’s pretty much beaten his knee pain and is back on his bike, powering up mountains. It took him a while to reach that point, he learned a lot, and I’d love for him to tell his complete story here at some point. (There are bits and pieces in the comments he’s left, scattered over a number of posts.)

Anyway, he dropped in a link to an article, "The use of low-dose naltrexone as a novel anti-inflammatory treatment for chronic pain."

First, people with stubborn knee pain usually suffer from the bad kind of inflammation: chronic inflammation that has a harmful effect on their joints. Getting inflammation under control is important to getting better.

This article suggests that low doses of naltrexone may be helpful for certain people:
Low-dose naltrexone (LDN) has been demonstrated to reduce symptom severity in conditions such as fibromyalgia, Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and complex regional pain syndrome. We review the evidence that LDN may operate as a novel anti-inflammatory agent in the central nervous system, via action on microglial cells.
Yes, no overt mention of knees, but complex regional pain syndrome may be a factor in some cases of knee pain, according to one reader of this blog who has researched this extensively.

Naltrexone apparently is used mainly to treat dependence on alcohol or opioids. It’s sold under the trade names Revia and Vivitrol, for example. If you’re having trouble with subduing inflammation, I encourage you to take a look.

Advantages of taking naltrexone include its moderate price (less than a dollar a day) and infrequent side effects.

Disadvantages are worth pointing out too: It’s unclear how to determine the best dose for particular individuals, and the default dose commonly used (4.5 mg) isn’t a size that tablets are now created in. Also the authors note: “Even though naltrexone has a long history of safe use with a wide range of large dosages, we know very little about the long-term safety of the drug when used chronically in low dosages.”

As usual, my standard disclaimer applies: This is not in any way my endorsement of this drug. I’ve never tried it myself; I don’t know anyone who has either. But when I was dealing with knee pain all the time, I eagerly read about anything and everything that might help me. So consider the above link in that spirit.