Exercise is great for you. But strenuous exercise or exercise gone wrong can also hurt. It can hurt your back, it can hurt your neck, it can hurt your knees. Conventional medicine has struggled to come up with solutions that are safe and effective. Nature may have solved the problem for them.
Musculoskeletal pain is very common: especially for people who exercise. Strenuous exercise can lead to inflammation and injuries.
Curcumin and boswellia are two of the best herbal anti-inflammatories and painkillers. A previous study found that the combination of the two worked well, and it worked fast. People with musculoskeletal pain were given either acetaminophen or a combination of the herbs. 66% of the herb group had a fast positive response after only 6 hours. 73% of the drug group had responded by then, but by days 3 and 7, the two treatments were equally effective. The herbs were 8.57 times better at improving the “unpleasantness and emotional aspects” of acute pain (Medicine (Baltimore) 2020;99(28):e20373).
That study suggested that curcumin and boswellia work really well: not a surprise for people who know these herbs. But it also suggested that they may work pretty fast. That’s welcome news because it is sometimes claimed that herbs work well, but they work slowly.
A new study put that belief to the test. The study included 232 people with exercise-induced acute musculoskeletal pain. Their pain had to be 5 or greater on a scale of 0-10. 80% of them registered pain levels between 7 and 9. 70 of them had lower back pain, 22 had shoulder pain, 20 had knee pain, 22 had lower body pain, and the other 98 had other types of pain, including neck, limb, joint, soft tissue injury, widespread musculoskeletal pain or other.
The double-blind study gave each of them either a placebo or 1000mg of the herbal combination, standardized for 266 mg curcuminoids and 10 mg acetyl keto-boswellic acid. They were given their treatment just one time. The question was, How well will the herbs work and how fast?
Six hours after being given the herbs, there was a significant 97.85% improvement in pain intensity compared to a paltry 2.46% in the placebo group.
The herbs worked fast. 99% of the people given the herbs had noticeable pain relief at only 68.5 minutes, and 96% had meaningful pain relief at 191.6 minutes. That noticeable pain relief came 4.98 times faster than with placebo, and the meaningful pain relief was 1.87 times faster. The pain relief was highly significant and continuous.
The combination of curcumin and boswellia was as safe as it was effective. There were no adverse events.
This important study shows that the combination of curcumin and boswellia can effectively relieve exercise-induced acute musculoskeletal pain of moderate-to-severe intensity in as little as 3 hours with noticeable relief beginning in just 68 minutes: effective, fast and safe!
Source: Medicine (Baltimore). 2022 Sep 2;101(35):e30144.