Thank you Jose Bolanos MD, Dr. Zeest Khan, Lawrence Toole, Julie, Stephen B. Thomas, PhD, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Join me for my next live video in the app.A Brief Summary of Our ConservationWe discussed the new understanding and approach to chronic pain, which affects nearly 1 in 4 adults. Dr. Gupta gets personal telling the story of his wife, Rebecca, who has an autoimmune disease and at one point he had to carry her up stairs. He also tells the story of his mother who had a back injury and didn’t want to live because of the pain. How his family members got relief is illuminating.Our whole understanding and approach to pain has changed, with the acronym change from RICE to MEAT.A newly approved drug Suzetrigine (Journavx) exploits the sodium channel gene mutation initially discovered via a family of fire walkers. It’s the first new pain medicine approved for more than 2 decades. Many other new non-opioid treatments are reviewed, no less lifestyle changes (anti-inflammatory diet and sleep), and acupuncture.Sanjay’s research over the past few years has led to a video special on CNN with the same title as the book, set to air 9 PM EST Sunday. If you know someone suffering chronic pain, please share the post. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe
Full Episode
but we're going to make up for lost time with a great discussion of your new book. It doesn't have to hurt. It's about pain. And it's a topic that involves a fourth of Americans or people that have chronic pain. It's a big deal. And you've given a whole new outlook on it. And what I thought we'd start with, Sanjay, you get very personal in the book, which is really admirable.
And you talk about your wife, Rebecca, who has an autoimmune disease. so bad that you had to carry her up the stairs. And can you tell us how she was able to get on top of her chronic pain problem and emerge doing really well?
Yeah, that was a tough one, Dr. Topol. And just to give you a little context, a few years before she started developing symptoms of her autoimmune disease, very active. I mean, we would do triathlons together. We would do the Malibu triathlon out in your neck of the woods.
Yeah.
And then, you know, she started to get significant symptoms. It was joint pain, sometimes rash. She carried a diagnosis of psoriatic arthritis at times. I remember talking to her once when she was in the throes of pain and I asked her to sort of point to where it hurt. And she pointed to a place on her body and said, this is the only place that doesn't hurt on my body. And so it was significant.
What ended up helping her, in addition to some of the various medications that are out there, and you see ads for a lot of these medications, Humira, the TNF blockers, things like that, which are very challenging meds because there's not a specific biomarker to sort of follow. You have to just sort of see how someone's doing over weeks and months.
I think the thing that really helped her in addition to that was a very restrictive diet. It was anti-inflammatory, but even more than that, it was just a very restrictive diet. So she pared everything down to just basic white rice and baked chicken for a while and then slowly started to add things back in. And that ended up really working for her.
I don't know, again, if it was TNF, tumor necrosis factor levels that went down, or if it was another inflammatory mediator. Again, we don't measure these things. But what I did know is that she felt better, she looked great, and she started to become more active again.
That's fantastic. And it emphasizes how these lifestyle factors, like an anti-inflammatory diet, and also you, of course, get into sleep, how important that is to deal with this pain.
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