Do “Natural” Painkillers Really Work?

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝A friend of mine has hip pain, especially after walking, and prefers to avoid ordinary painkillers. I’ve seen a natural products mentioned and wondered if you would recommend them, or suggest any other natural options for pain relief❞

There are definitely natural pain relief options that work, albeit sometimes with drawbacks. There are plenty more that don’t work better than placebo.

But first, let’s talk about placebo: when something “doesn’t work better than placebo”, it’s easy to think that that means it doesn’t help. In reality, it does!

After all, placebo may be “all in your head”—but so is your ability to perceive pain.

For more on that, check out: How To Leverage Placebo Effect For Yourself

However, let’s say you want to know whether something is likely to work better than placebo. A fair question.

How to check whether a product is likely to work better than placebo

First: look at the ingredients. Is there anything that stands out here as having an obvious mechanism of action? That can include “this thing has a calming/relaxing effect” even if it doesn’t directly touch pain itself, but if that’s the case, it’s worth bearing in mind when weighing up options.

Tip: if you want to Google an ingredient to find out whether it works, then whatever you write in the search bar, add the following:

site:pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

You might want to save that line to your phone’s Notes app or something. That way, it’ll just return results from PubMed, which is a large online repository of most of the world’s peer-reviewed scientific literature. So, you’ll get actually verified information, rather than just what someone wrote on the Internet.

Alternatively you can just bookmark PubMed itself and directly use their own search feature, here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

Next: look at the ingredients again. Have we checked this is not a case of “this thing sounds like this other thing but it’s not”? This happens a lot with, for example, hemp products that are relying on medicinal cannabis marketing but do not actually contain THC (or sometimes, do not even contain CBD). See also: Do CBD Gummies Work? ← the answer is “sometimes”, and this page explains why and also links to further articles we’ve written on the science of CBD and, separately, THC specifically.

Next: look at the ingredients yet again. Watch out for “made with real…” claims. If something actually contains the ingredient, they don’t usually say “made with real…”, they just list the ingredient. Often, what “made with real…” means is that an ingredient that is present was derived from the marketed ingredient, rather than actually being the marketed ingredient. We see this a lot on food products that are “made with real fruit”, for example, and what it really means it that they used sugar. The same switcheroo is often employed shamelessly when it comes to herbal products and the like.

Next: look at the dosage. Similar to the previous item; does this have something that technically has a certain effect, but the dosage here is so small as to be practically homeopathic?

On a tangential note there: homeopathy does not, by the way, outperform placebo (and sometimes does worse): Homeopathy: Evidence So Tiny That It’s Not there?

Natural Options that work

Here are some we’ve written about previously:

• The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
• Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief
• Dial Down Your Pain
• How Nature Provides Us With A Surprisingly Powerful Painkiller
• Stop Pain From Spreading ← this is particularly important to understand, because “referred pain” is painfully common and often avoidable
• The Music That Has Painkilling Effects
• How Estrogen & Progesterone Affect Your Pain

And for a specialized biomechanical approach for the situation you described:

Just the hips

As for reducing/managing hip pain specifically, we wrote about that here:

Head Over Hips

For those who learning from short videos, here’s a trio of helpers (along with our own text-based overview for each):

• The Most Underrated Hip Mobility Exercise (Not Stretching)
• Overcome Front-Of-Hip Pain
• 10 Tips To Reduce Morning Pain & Stiffness With Arthritis

And for those who prefer just reading, here’s a book we reviewed on the topic:

11 Minutes to Pain-Free Hips – by Melinda Wright

Take care!