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Shaina Loos's avatar

Hi Paul, I've been a long-time reader and follower of your work! I found it back around maybe 2008-ish because of my own chronic pain, and then I went to school to became a RMT from 2011-2013, and was grateful to have the background of reading your work to give me a critical and informed approach about the limitations of the current curriculum in massage therapy education.... based on that background I was actually pretty disappointed in the education. Anyway, I haven't read your stuff in a while (I had a baby in 2020 and have been busy parenting), but I'm now catching up with Project try everything. I have also tried a lot of stuff for my own chronic pain and IBS, and the diet piece has been very helpful for me. I did a deep dive into reading about dietary stuff in around 2014 and came across the work of Sarah Ballantyne, Phd and did a couple of rounds of the autoimmune paleo protocol that she developed - I warn you that it is quite an intense and difficult dietary protocol, but in my opinion totally worth it. It helped me pinpoint a few different foods that I'm sensitive to and generally up-level my health. I would say it reduced my pain by around 50%, which is huge! Her work is very well referenced and evidence-based and I think you would appreciate her very grounded science approach. Here is a great place to start: https://www.thepaleomom.com/what-is-leaky-gut-and-how-can-it-cause/

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Midge's avatar

"I am skeptical that just a couple days of bowel stoppage could make me feel soooo baaaad."

On the other hand, feeling soooo baaaad for any reason might involve central sensitization, which is a suspect in gut disorders, too. An unalerted brain might happily ignore most murmurings from our visceral nervous system, but an alerted brain?...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/nmo.14156

At PainScience, you once explained your dad's hyperacusis, and that, while humans can share external references to what is "too loud", we sadly can't for pain. I often get hyperacusis with migraines, and experience that amplified sound and amplified pain during migraine seem convincingly similar (though, of course, our experiences can fool us, too). Whatever my brain is doing during a migraine, it seems pretty good at convincing itself that noxiously heightening all the senses, not just pain, is somehow a good idea.

This is comforting in a way, because while feeling sorry for oneself is a commonly-suspected reason for general malaise and sensitivity to pain, we don't expect people to sense light and sound more acutely just because they feel sorry for themselves! "Huh, I can't always control my silly brain" is less guilt-wracking than, "Can I be *sure* I haven't drama-queened my way into feeling crummy?"

EDITED TO ADD: Migraineurs frequently report that sensory disturbance precedes pain. An "alerty" brain prone to central sensitization may not start with pain-alerts. That you didn't start feeling soooo baaaad until after the auditory barrage doesn't exclude the possibility your CNS decided to get hypervigilant about gut sensation for some reason.

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