Home // Is Anti-inflammatory Medication Putting You at Risk of Chronic Pain?
We’ve all been there.
Whatever the reason, you ended up with lower back pain.
You iced, you rested, and you started popping ibuprofen or naproxen to dull the pain.
It may seem that while a painkiller is good, one that also suppresses inflammation is better. After all, isn’t inflammation the root cause of myriad health problems? Unfortunately, the picture is more nuanced than that. Research suggests that suppressing the body’s inflammatory response through medication may increase the risk of ending up with chronic pain.
Chronic pain is a widespread problem with a tremendous negative impact on quality of life. A 2021 study noted that in the U.S., over 50 million people are estimated to suffer from chronic pain, which limits their ability to engage in social activities and normal daily activities. Respondents with chronic pain reported missing 10.3 workdays annually, as opposed to 2.8 days for those without chronic pain.
The most frequently reported type of chronic pain is lower back pain. Lower back pain is usually treated with medications such as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) or corticosteroids, which specifically target the immune system’s inflammatory response, in conjunction with other therapies. Researchers sought to understand why over 15% of patients treated for acute back pain went on to develop chronic back pain, a condition that can be seriously debilitating.
To do so, they recruited a cohort of patients with acute lower back pain and followed them for three months, examining their transcriptional activity (the first step in how genes are expressed) to understand their immune system activity. The results were surprising—among patients whose pain resolved without becoming chronic, activity of inflammatory genes spiked during the acute pain stages. The chronic pain group showed no such spike in the activity of inflammatory genes.
Further experimentation in mice confirmed their findings. Administering anti-inflammatory medication suppressed pain in the short term but resulted in persistent pain in the long run. The researchers also reviewed data from a much larger cohort of people suffering from lower back pain in the UK Biobank. That analysis showed that patients who were treated with NSAIDs for lower back pain had nearly two times the risk of developing chronic back pain as compared to those treated with pain-killing medication that did not suppress inflammation.
To understand what might feel like a paradox, it’s important to differentiate between acute inflammation and chronic inflammation. Acute inflammation is what happens when the body is confronted with an injury or illness—the immune system mobilizes to fight infection and rebuild damaged tissue. Fever, swelling, pain, and redness are all symptoms of this natural response. Chronic inflammation, by contrast, occurs when the immune system keeps up that response when there is no injury or illness to fight, attacking healthy tissues. You want acute inflammation to be able to do its job, but you don’t want your immune system on high alert 24/7.
The researchers in this study theorized that by artificially suppressing acute inflammation early on, NSAIDs contributed to the development of chronic lower back pain in the patients studied by interfering with their natural healing processes. So how can people regulate inflammation in a way that won’t put them at risk for developing chronic pain?
Diet is one of the most powerful ways to reduce chronic inflammation without standing in the way of your body’s ability to respond to illness or injury when it needs to. In fact, whole-food nutrition is one of the best ways to help the body heal itself! But often modern diets can leave hidden gaps in our nutrition. At the Natural Healing Center, that’s why one of the cornerstones of our personalized plans is Nutrition Response Testing, a noninvasive method of pinpointing the cause of client symptoms and the nutrients needed to correct them. In conjunction with other therapies designed to reduce stress and boost the body’s natural processes, our approach gives your body what it needs to achieve optimal health.
If you’re looking for a better way to achieve long-term wellness in body and mind, the Natural Healing Center can help. Our focus is on supporting your ongoing well-being with a holistic, individualized approach that eliminates the source of symptoms through natural healing modalities. To schedule your free initial consultation, contact us here.
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