Functional Medicine Expert Webinar on Natural Pain Relief with Oliver Barnett

Catch up as Oliver takes you through his top tips on Natural Pain Relief. Based on a Functional Medicine approach Oliver explores the root cause of pain and conditions that can lead to discomfort.

As part of our recent webinar series, Oliver provided functional medicine insight on Natural Pain Relief, Understanding Gut Health, Improving Immunity and Boosting Energy Levels.

His experience with over 20,000 patients is invaluable and you can catch up on each of these webinars on demand.

Watch the Webinar Here >

Video transcript:

My background has been quite multi disciplined. So through herbal medicine, naturopathy, nutrition, mind body medicine, depth psychology, ayurveda. So a real sort of smorgasbord of different approaches.

I run the clinic with a team of about ten clinicians and a number of support staff, and we’ve tended to specialise in chronic illness, the type of things that your doctors or GPs or specialists can’t really deal with, with sort of an acute care model, which mainly conventional medicine is it’s emergency medicine?

Trying to treat chronic conditions with an acute care model. So today’s talk is about pain and. What causes pain in people and the types of conditions that do that and what we can do about it. And if you just would like to say, it’s being recorded today,

If you do have any questions, please do ask them in the chat. We should have a bit of time at the end for questions.

I’d like to start is that pain can come around from a number of different places or reasons, but a lot of the time with pain, obviously it can come from, say, autoimmune conditions that we treat a lot at the clinic.

The title of this talk was called Natural pain relievers. But for me, what I’d like to do is to go into where does pain originate from? And what is it being caused by? And obviously, if you go to your doctor or specialist and you’re in physical pain, it’s likely that you’ll be put on some type of medication to help with that pain, whether that’s at the lower end, obviously, of, say, ibuprofen or paracetamol, and then moving up, obviously, into things like opiates or biologic drugs on top of that.

But none of that does anything to deal with the underlying cause. And ultimately, you could do exactly the same thing with natural medicine. You could give someone, say, take ibuprofen, for example, which is a Cox Two inhibitor. You can do exactly the same and give someone, say, curcumin or Turmeric or Boswellia, which has a similar effect. But again, it doesn’t deal with the underlying reason as to why the person is feeling in pain in the first place.

And a lot of good research now has gone into working with pain, people with who are in a lot of pain, intransigent pain, using mindfulness based practices. And what we’re seeing now is that using mindfulness or using mindfulness for chronic health conditions, there’s an actual course on it.

Many, many people are actually getting a lot of relief doing a mindfulness course and using a mindfulness based practice far more than they would say with medication. Also, we have to ask ourselves, where does the pain originate from?

I read somewhere years back, I can’t remember what it was, it said that in some cases, pain is stored shame and a lot of pain based conditions are caused from inherited and developmental trauma.

So at the moment, the whole trauma thing has become quite fashionable and popular. But it’s obviously been more popularised by people like Gabor Maté, some people may have heard of. And it’s very unusual for me to, I’ve worked with circa 20,000 patients, and it’s very unusual for me to see people with autoimmune conditions or in pain based conditions when there hasn’t been an element of inherited or developmental trauma.

And that can be trauma, doesn’t have to be a big trauma. It doesn’t have to be, say, losing a loved one at an early age or seeing a sibling die or something like that. It can be an ongoing trauma of a small ‘t’, let’s say.

And that’s a Gabor Maté line, to quote him. And that small tea could be not having that ongoing unconditional love and nurturing care as a child. And that’s the trauma of a small t or not being seen and heard.

And what the research now shows is that especially things like the Aces studies, which are the older studies, which is the Adverse Childhood Event Studies, they’ve shown that once a child or young person has more than two or three adverse childhood events. Their tendency to then get autoimmune conditions, chronic fatigue, chronic health problems, post viral fatigue, all that type of stuff massively increased the more adverse childhood events that actually occur.

And then when we see people in the clinic, if I had to say what are the two biggest symptoms that we see with chronic health problems? It’s. Pain and fatigue. And on a future webinar, I’ll be talking about fatigue.

But today we’re sort of focusing on pain. And I think that with autoimmune conditions and the pain and the symptoms that people are experiencing, that’s a downstream effect with the physiology. So the symptoms and the biochemistry and the physiology are ultimately a downstream effect of the inherited and developmental trauma and what’s gone on before.

So I think any approach of any patient who is in chronic pain and has been in that way for many, many years, there has to be an approach. Looking at the emotional, the mental and the spiritual component of that and looking at that person’s, listening to that person’s story of where they’ve been and what that journey to that has been.

And what we tend to find is that because a lot of the pain based conditions that we’ll see in the clinic, like the inflammatory type conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis or connective tissue disease or lupus or chronic fatigue, or whatever that might be.
There’s a chap in Israel, quite a famous auto-immunologist called Dr. Yehuda Schoenfield, and he says that all autoimmune conditions are caused by an infectious etiology till proven otherwise.

So what he’s saying there is that infection or latent infection is driving that autoimmune condition. And what we now know from research that things like rheumatoid arthritis professor Alan Eringer used to be at Kings, said that did some research around how rheumatoid arthritis had an infectious component to it and the infection he found was called proteus.

Another example we do see many patients. That got inflammatory based condition diagnoses and they’ve got a latent infection underlying it. And a very common one is Lyme disease.

So the most common misdiagnoses with pain based conditions are lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, the whole mixed connective tissue disease spectrum and all multiple sclerosis as well.

And the problem a lot of the time on conventional medicine is that the conventional testing for Lyme disease is not very good, nor often actually, to be honest. The private testing has limitations as well.
And what will happen is sometimes a relatively creative, conventional doctor might run a standard Lyme test on you. So you haven’t got Lyme, so therefore you must rheumatoid arthritis or lupus or whatever it might be.

But then it’s very poorly diagnosed. So the patient then goes on to whatever biologic drugs they’re on or pain relieving drugs that they’re given. Again, not really dealing with the underlying reasons.
And again, if you think of pain as well, pain, physical pain is also often emotional pain. And that emotional pain is actually being felt in the body physically and often if we don’t deal with grief suffering, because grief in the west is dealt with really badly, but in the Eastern and African traditions it’s a shared responsibility.

And some people may have heard of the term grief tending and if we don’t tend to our grief then that can then appear as physical conditions in the body. And I’ve seen this hundreds and hundreds of times where patients haven’t dealt with early life trauma, haven’t dealt with loss, grief, and then that then is manifest in the body.

They get given a diagnosis of whatever the pain based condition, let’s say it’s fibromyalgia. Which just means pain in multiple places. But ultimately the underlying cause is un-dealt with pain, emotional pain.

And I find that also in Chinese. Medicine, different organs of the body are associated with different emotions. And we also see the meridian lines as well in dental work.

I even had a recent patient who had a history of breast cancer, it turned out that they actually had, when you look at the teeth meridians, they actually had almost a whole tooth made of mercury sitting on the breast cancer meridian.

The breast meridian, sorry.

And this patient had breast cancer twice. So I do think that was a part playing into the reason why she had that. And now I think she’s had the tooth removed. So I believe that’s just, again, giving it a bit of a Chinese medicine perspective.

I also find that talking of fibromyalgia. And there is a fantastic treatment system. Not many people are aware of for pain, which I’m a big fan of, called Frequency Specific Microcurrent.

It was developed by a chiropractic doctor in America, a lady called Carolyn. McMakin, and there’s not too many practitioners in the UK offering it, but at Southern House in Golders Green, Eva and her team have got a good team of people providing that there.

And that’s a fantastic treatment for pain relief. And we’re really lucky now because the CIS system used to be about three and a half, or 4000 pounds, the actual device to treat it within the clinic. But we now have a less powerful system that we can connect up to our iPhones or iPads and buy for about 400 pounds.

Once we get the actual frequencies for the specific condition. That we need to be working with, then people can get immediate relief from pain. If you take a pain score, say, of where ten is the most pain you could possibly be in, and one is pain free, let’s say, or zero is pain free.

Many people with fibromyalgia and pain based conditions walk out of FSM treatments going from, say, a nine to one. Yes, the pain will come back again, end, but over time, it will diminish with multiple treatments.

So I find frequency specific microcurrent is an absolute game changer with many conditions, but specifically pain based conditions. And if anyone’s interested in reading up on it, Carolyn’s book, it’s a very small book, and you can read it in a couple of hours, and it’s a real feel good book.

It’s called the Resonance Effect. It’s a really enjoyable read. Another thing with pain is that when we’re feeling pain in the body, a question we might want to ask ourselves is where is it being felt and why?
And what is the message? What is the body trying to tell us? And is there a hidden message in that? That’s something as well, that we can ask again with pain? There are obviously, I mentioned earlier, natural approaches to pain management from a sort of a supplemental or herbal basis, but it will be working on the same mechanisms and pathways that conventional drugs would be working on, such as ibuprofen or paracetamol, things like that.

Let’s say people can reduce inflammation in the body that’s undoubted naturally. And the more common approaches would be things like high doses of fish oils. Say 3 grams a day. You can use herbal medicine, as I said, things like boswellia curcumin, high doses as well.

Some people do well on CBD oil and then also some people do better on THC oil. Now, CBD is the legal version, THC is the illegal version. We can’t provide, obviously, THC oil to patients, but many patients do seem to be resourceful.
And a high number of patients coming to the clinic these days do seem to be taking THC oil for pain relief and say that works really, really well for them. I mean, THC oil also is very good for reducing tumour sizes in cancer as well.

Something to be mindful of as well. Curcumin can be used intravenously as well. And we do Curcumin IVs at the clinic and some people really swear by that. So it really works well for them. Also, Curcumin IVs can be very good for cancer as well.

Another thing I should mention as well, we see a lot of patients coming into the clinic for post COVID issues, whether that’s, say, after effects of vaccination or long COVID. We’re seeing a fair bit of that.
And again, it’s that it’s the fatigue and the pain that seem to be the most prevalent symptoms. And again, with the pain that people are getting from long COVID or vaccine damage, the most evidence we have at the moment in terms of the research is around mitochondrial dysfunction and the mitochondria often getting damaged.

And by. Spike protein toxicity and that’s where most of the research tends to be because of long COVID or vaccine damage, it’s the same mechanism. And if we can then repair the mitochondria in those patients and there is testing you can do from Germany looking at the mitochondria and how they’re affected in these types of patients and you can get pointers as to how to treat the patient and what system within the mitochondria to approach.

We can then get quite good results for patients and reduce their pain levels by understanding if the mitochondria have been affected and in many patients they have been. So that’s another approach I’m finding specifically helpful. We’re finding those patients with either long COVID or post vaccine issues.

I also would go back to one other thing I would like to go back to again is what I said at the beginning is the mindfulness based practices for pain have been transformational for many, many people.

And if you go into the research and look at it and try it, it’s really quite remarkable the results people are getting. And again, funny, I was thinking before this of a I can’t remember the study now, but I remember the study now where looking at placebo and the power of placebo is incredibly powerful.

And there was a very famous study from one of the main journals where they gave patients for post surgery care opiates, opiate based pain relief. And they gave the control group obviously placebo and what they found actually was the control group had better pain relief than the people on opiates
.
So it shows you the power of the mind and if you expect to get a positive response from something, then you often do. Another famous example was one from the Lancet from years ago where they did knee surgery arthroscopy and they performed sham arthroscopy.

So they pretended to do knee surgery on patients. And it was the patients that had the they pretended to do the knee surgery on had better knee outcomes than the patients that had the real surgery. So conventional drug companies in their research are always trying to reduce placebo because they want the medication or the treatment to be far better than placebo.
But what we should be doing is we should be celebrating placebo and relishing in it. So that’s something to be mindful of as well. I also would like to mention infrared saunas, which for some people can be very, very useful.

There’s good ones and there’s bad ones out there. I’m a big fan of Get Fitt who do these cocoons or mat based infrared saunas. An infrared sauna can be very, very useful for pain based conditions. I’ve seen time and time again that it is a really useful adjunct therapy as well.

That sort of leads me on to mentioning obviously no sort of integrated health talk would be an integrated health talk if I wasn’t talking about toxicity. And patients do experience pain and chronic pain through toxicity.

And I think one of the main toxins I see is for patients that get into the bones and really deep bone pain, some patients describe it as ice pick pain. But it can be just generalized pain, can be from mold toxicity.

So if people have been living in water damaged buildings. And even if they’ve moved out of them and they’re still holding mycotoxins or toxins from mold stored in the body, then that can be a major contributing factor to pain.

Some things to look out for maybe could be such as, do you feel better for being outside the home? Do you go away for a couple of days? And does your symptom, your symptoms is reduced? Doesn’t have to be just pain. It could be headaches or whatever.

Notice how you feel in different environments. So, yeah, do notice that. I again, and also notice as well. Is places your pain is worse in.

Is it worse in, say, damp old environments as well? A lot of patients’ pain will be worse when conditions are damp or cold or in particular environments.

A lot of trees. So if you’re finding that, like trees or it’s woody areas or where it’s damp or yeah, look at the areas and the locations you’re in.

And then if that’s the case, there’s a reasonable chance and you’re dealing with environmental issues in relation to the pain as well.

And some people also will get pain talking about environmental issues and toxins when they’re exposed to particular chemicals as well. And patients will realise this when they are exposed to certain chemicals or certain environments. All my pain levels are much high, especially you’ve got multiple chemical sensitivity and things like that.

And again, with. The immune system. We’re seeing a lot of patients with a lot of immune dysregulation and people are giving all these sort of fancy names to these things like mast cell disorders or mastocytosis and things like that.
And again, that to me is just like an aberration in immune regulation, which ultimately comes from a nervous system that’s been really smashed. And that nervous system has been smashed by nearly always inherited and developmental trauma, like I was saying earlier.

So the body is not able to be in a safe place and it’s in that sort of free state rather than the fight or flight state, let’s say. And by being in that free state, the self regulating systems of the body are just not working properly.

The body then tends to react to itself, which is effective, is autoimmunity, then we then experience pain. I think that probably gives a good brief outline of my sort of own journey of helping people in those situations.

I know we’ve had a few questions and I’ll just have a look in the chat box at the questions.

First question from Linda was do SMP resolvents contain omega three and do they help from neuropathy? Thank you.

I don’t know the answer to that question. I’m sorry, Linda, I really don’t know. Pass.

Next person, Judith is asked, can you write the name of the book in the chat about FSM? Yeah, I can do it, I’ll say it again?

It’s the Resonance Effect, but I’ll type it as well. And the author is Dr Carolyn McMahon, who is really a really impressive woman. Um, one other treatment as well, I should mention, for pain as well, is hyperbaric oxygen therapy is a really, really good treatment.

And there’s now a really good centre in central London called Nur Hyperbarics in Marylebone, near where our clinic is. And they’ve got about eight hyperbaric chambers there. And the woman who runs it, Dr. Nur, is a very impressive lady. And you knew that. 15 sessions of hyperbaric oxygen to see if that’s going to help you.

They had very promising results in long COVID as well. Hyperbaric people.

Someone asked about chirotherapy.

Again, chirotherapy, I don’t know I don’t know the benefits with pain. I don’t know enough about it, so I’m not able to comment. I could, but I’d rather talk about something at least I know about. Again, infrared sauna I’ve mentioned, and I haven’t really found any downsides in infrared sauna, although some people can get reactions, and I’ll go slowly.

But if you work with Get Fitt, the company that makes the best saunas, then they will guide you as to how to use them. Someone’s asked about bad infrared saunas. As I say, the only company I would work with is called Get Fit.
Most of the other ones on the market are of lesser quality and are not generally doing whole body infrared. Even if you’re doing, say, sauna cabins like clear light and things like that, they’re not whole body infrared.

And Get Fitt are now offering a very good range of wearable devices like jackets and chiles and things like that that can be very useful or you can wear all day at a low level rather than using their professional kit, let’s say the yeah.

Barbara’s asked, is the hyperbaric oxygen treatment okay with Lyme disease? Yeah, it’s a great therapy with Lyme, yeah. There’s very few contraindications, very few contraindications with hyperbarics.

Obviously they would go through that with you at the centre and make sure that obviously they were covering any contraindications with that treatment. So I think for me, that probably wraps up a brief look at natural pain relief.

And I just wonder what I’d say, that if people do want to get in touch with the clinic, do get in touch with us online. Do phone us if you need to. You can book on our website a discovery call to see who might be the clinician best suited to your needs.

Because different people in our team specialise in different areas. So we have Melody, who specialises in Parkinson’s, let’s say, so we have a particular or Julia, who specialises in cancer. So there’s different people specialising in different areas.

I tend to deal personally with most stuff and I take a much more sort of deeper sort of depth psychology and sort of psychospiritual approach alongside everything else I do with the other disciplines I work in to provide a rounded approach to working with people with chronic illness.

So, yeah, thanks very much for listening today. If there are any further questions, I will keep the zoom open for another minute or two. People want to type their questions in the chat box and today has been recorded.

So people do wish to listen back, that’s fine with them. If people are wondering what I’m drinking here, it’s not a beer, it’s a water, which is lemon and ginger flavoured from a company called Agua de Madre.

I think it’s the best one out there. And they claim there’s 55 billion live organisms per bottle. Question is, does that reach the gut environment? We don’t know, obviously. And some of some of these claims that you read about, number of organisms, you just don’t know whether that reaches the gut environment or not.

But I tend to like it and I think it’s the best one out there. So, just in case anyone’s wondering what I’m drinking here, I’m not a beer fan personally.

So someone’s mentioned, yeah, Senna is quite good, but FSM works very, very differently to those devices.
It is one of the single best treatments I’ve come across for pain post operative care.

I mean, the list is endless. Diabetic wounds, fatigue, fibromyalgia, any pain based conditional injury works really, really well with FSM.

There is a practitioner in Bath, there’s also one in Fulham. There’s many in Golders Green, but there’s not too many in the UK, but, I’d highly recommend it. Kafir is called Agua de Madre. It’s about three pounds a bottle and it’s quite tasty.

Most of them are quite sweet, but the lemon and ginger flavour is the one I like because it’s not sweet. So, yeah, thanks very much, everyone, and see you guys soon. Bye bye.