Of Magic Pills and Surgery

A brief post today about magic pills and surgery.

I saw this yesterday:

When it comes to battling with joint pain in a natural way, certain remedies like the use of methylsulfonylmethane (MSM) may be helpful.

That word is certainly an impressive concatenation of chemical prefixes, and gave me flashbacks to high school chemistry. I will add that I know nothing about methylsulfonylmethane.

(I have written extensively about glucosamine and chondroitin, which rigorous scientific studies have turned against as solutions to knee pain. They are most likely placebos, it appears.)

So why am I down on something that I know nothing about?

It's more like this: we want things to be easy. Take a pill. Or schedule a surgery. And whatever ails us is fixed.

Essentially, you hand over control of your knee pain to a surgeon, or to the researchers who came up with the formulation for the pill.

But I don't think it usually works out well with knee pain. My experience is that YOU have to get involved with YOUR knee pain. You can't outsource the problem to some nutraceutical company, or orthopedic surgeon.

You have to focus on beneficial movement, monitor symptoms closely, and not lose sight of the end goal, day after day after day.

But you may be thinking: What's wrong with taking a pill? Maybe it will help.

Maybe. But it may also lull you into thinking that you can be less vigilant in your own efforts to fix the problem.

Anyway, for the record, I took a number of different joint pills. I don't think any of them helped in the least. I also followed a strict program of movement that gradually increased in intensity, and that worked.

That's how I think knee pain suffers get better, not by popping something out of a bottle. (Note: there are times of course when surgery makes sense, but there are far too many knee surgeries for problems that can't easily be fixed by that kind of intervention.)