Pain, Inflammation & Degenerative Disk disease
I'm not following the pattern for injury reporting as this is a chronic condition, not acute. Hope that's OK.
This is a question about alternative anti-inflammatory measures. My friend, we’ll call him J., has degenerative disk disease at L4-L5 and L5-S1. Treatment options have been all but exhausted – long term he’s waiting to be a candidate for 2-level disk replacement surgery – in the meantime, he gets some relief from epidurals, but that is limited to 2 or 3 times a year. He’s currently waiting to get scheduled for an MRI before scheduling his next epidural.
Based on the relief he gets from anti-inflammatory treatments most of his pain (at this time) seems to be inflammation related. He was doing pretty well on the new COX-2 NSAIDS (I think he was on Celebrex) until they were removed from the market. The older ones don’t seem to give adequate relief. He gets good results from an occasional 3 week course of prednisone, but that doesn’t seem to extend the relief for many days (or weeks) after the course has completed.
He’s adjusted his diet to minimize omega-6 intake and increase omega-3 intake (fish oil), but it is hard to find anyone with specific recommendations for therapeutic levels of EPA/DHA. He’s tried SAM-e, but it seemed to coincide with some skin symptoms so he’s hesitant to try it again.
He does get some pain control with specific pain medications (e.g. Vicodin) but since he gets good relief from anti-inflammatories he’d rather go that route if he can. External modalities don’t seem to have much effect.
Does anyone have links or information about therapeutic levels of omega-3 supplementation? What about any information about other anti-inflammatory measures? Or other ideas for pain relief for someone with virtually no disks left?
Just to add this in as well, he seems to have a recurring chronic inflammatory response, outside of his back. Primarily this manifests as skin rash on back and extremities - garden variety atopic dermititis is all that has ever been named for it, it responds to topical hydrocortisone or oral as well.
I'm thinking there might be something there - some underlying common mechanism -but don't know enough about it to even guess. or I could be full of it. The lack of disk is very real - but might the inflammatory response might be independent and just manifesting in the back? just musing here. Would still like to hear if there are any thoughts on anti-inflammatory measures.
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