Considering that I had to leave work early today because of some of the worst back pain I’ve had since injuring my back over 5 years ago, I guess it makes it a good day to do an update on my efforts to live free of back pain and sciatica.

I started a 30 day trial of the Lose The Back Pain system from the Healthy Back Institute on June 24th of this year — that’s over 30 days ago, so one might assume that the 30 day trial is now over… but it isn’t.

I had to abort my 30 day trial of the Lose The Back Pain System a couple weeks ago when my grandfather passed away and I had family from out of town staying in the spare room, which happens to be the only place that I have enough room to do the stretches and exercises required by the program.

I was able to start doing the exercises and stretches again starting last night, but I will soon be interrupted again when I go to the Shambhala Music Festival in a little over a week. I will continue doing the stretches until that time, and if possible, I will continue doing whatever stretches and exercises I can while at the festival, but I doubt I will get around to doing much for stretching once I’m actually at the festival.

Completing the 30 day trial isn’t absolutely necessary though, because I plan to continue using the system until it works, even if it takes 6 months, or a year.

The first 2 weeks of ‘Lose The Back Pain’

During the first two weeks that I did the Lose The Back Pain corrective exercises, I had fairly positive results over all. Most of those days went by with less pain than normal, and my back would only get sore after doing something to set it off — something like carrying heavy objects, lifting things, pushing heavy objects, bending over for extended periods of time, or sitting on bad chairs/couches. For the most part the pain was minimal until something aggravated it.

Almost every day I would still have a pretty sore back by the end of the day, especially after 12 hour shifts at work, but the pain was less intense and didn’t last as long as before I had started doing the exercises.

There were a couple of days where the pain was stronger than usual, though. I’m not sure exactly why, but there were 2 days that I can remember specifically that I thought I felt worse than I did before starting the exercises. On those days I went a bit easier when doing the corrective stretches and exercises for that day. It seemed to help, because the next day would be much better.

Stopping the corrective exercises

As I mentioned above, my grandfather passed away and I had some family from out of town come to stay in the spare bedroom that I do my stretches in. This caused me to stop doing the corrective exercises for a while.

At first it didn’t seem to make much of a difference, my back felt about the same as usual, but this last week has been horrific. The last 5 days have been some of the worst days for back pain that I can remember in the whole 5 years I have been struggling with it. The first of the last 5 days was a 12 hour shift at work doing some pretty heavy lifting all night long for 12 hours — by the end of the shift my back hurt quite a bit, but I expected that since I had been doing so much work.

The next day I woke up and I was quite stiff and my back was sore. I don’t usually wake up with too much back pain, it usually gets worse as the day goes on and is worst at the end of the day. I knew I was off to a bad start for that day, but I went in to work anyway and worked my shift. The entire day I was really sore, I had lots of sciatic pain and also general lower back pain/ache.

I had the next 2 days off, those two days were not as bad as the first two, but they were also quite painful. I did very little to aggravate it during these two days, because I knew how sore it had been during the previous two and I didn’t want to have to repeat it.

Yesterday I had to work again and it was one of the most painful days I’ve had in a long time. I was incredibly sore after work. I am now able to do the corrective exercises again, because the guests have now gone home, so I did them lightly last night. Surprisingly, doing the stretches didn’t seem to make it hurt any more at all, it actually hurt less to do the stretches last night than it did when I first started doing them back in June! My back was still very sore, but doing the stretches didn’t seem to aggravate it at all. I found that really weird — I was expecting that doing the stretches would be extremely painful.

When I went to bed, my back was really sore and when I woke up this morning it was still really sore. The last 2 days have not been the usual sciatic type of pain though, it’s been more of an ache in my lower back and right leg and not the tingly and ‘pinching’ feeling that I usually get. Maybe that’s why it seems to hurt more than usual, because it hurts in a different way than I’ve gotten used to.

When I got up to go to work this morning, I took 600mg of Ibuprofen, which I don’t normally do. I almost always avoid pharmaceuticals, especially stuff like Ibuprofen and Tylenol. They’re unhealthy and they don’t usually do very much for me, but I was in pretty bad pain so I decided to give them a try. By noon today I was too sore to stay for the rest of the shift — I told my supervisor I had to go see a chiropractor or someone to help with the pain, and I clocked out early.

Making appointments

On my way out of work one of my co-workers recommended a good massage therapist to me. I’ve only been to a massage therapist once, and it wasn’t that great of an experience, but the therapist I saw actually shared an office with the chiropractor I was seeing at the time who was also not very good.

Because of my experience with that particular chiropractor I said I would never go to another chiropractor again because I’m sure he actually made my back weaker instead of helping to fix the problems.

The massage therapist that my coworker recommended sounds pretty good so I went ahead and booked a 90 minute session with her for this coming Friday, I’m looking forward to that for sure!

I also was going to try and see a chiropractor today for a quick fix of the pain, but I was unable to find one that had any open bookings for today. I did come across something kind of synchronistic while looking for a new chiropractor though — over the last few days I’ve been looking into Qigong (chi kung, chi gong), and I found an 8 week course coming up in September that I am planning to register for. It’s being taught by a Dr. Orchard. While looking through the chiropractor section of the phone book I found ‘Dr. Orchard’s Holistic Health and Chiropractic’. When I looked at the address I recognized it as a clinic that had been recommended to me several years ago when I first injured my back and was seeing the ‘not so good’ chiropractor.

I did a little internet searching and found out that the Dr. Orchard that teaches Qigong and the Dr. Orchard who owns the clinic are the same guy. I decided that since I can’t get in anywhere to see a chiropractor today, I might as well go see Dr. Orchard whenever I can get in. I made a first time appointment with Dr. Orchard in August after I get back from the Shambhala Music Festival. Yeah, it’s a ways away still but I think the synchronicity was there to point me in the right direction, so I’m looking forward to meeting Dr. Orchard and seeing what he can do for me. It will also give me a bit of a chance to ask him a few things about his upcoming Qigong classes.

Proteolytic Enzymes

I also decided to take up the Healthy Back Institute on their offer of a free bottle of Heal-n-Soothe proteolytic enzyme formula for pain relief. I’ve read a lot of good things about enzyme treatments for pain and inflammation and since I’ve been in so much pain over the last few days, I decided it’s time to give Heal-n-Soothe a try.

I also was convinced to add a Freedom Back to my order, the freedom back is a ‘back orthodic’ that helps you keep a good posture when sitting in any chair. It was $49, so I thought I’d give it a try… what the hell, why not?

I’m really looking forward to the package arriving so I can start taking the enzyme formula, I think it will help me a lot more than the Ibuprofen I took today, that’s for sure!

I also stopped in at the health food store today to see if they had anything other than MSM and glucosomine to offer me for pain relief. As soon as I walked in there was a big stand of some ‘natural’ pain relief mixture. It’s called ‘Curamin’ and it was on sale for $35 a bottle. When I checked the ingredients list I right away put the bottle back on the shelf when I read that the first ingredient was “DLPA (dl Phenylalanine)” . Phenylalanine is pretty bad stuff and it’s what makes the artificial sweetener aspartame so bad for you. The other ingredients are Boswellia Extract, Curcumin Extract, and Nattokinase.

I ended up buying a bottle of Curamin, despite the fact that it has phenylalanine in it. I figured that I’m not going to be taking it regularly and that if it helped beat the pain even just for today that it was probably worth the $35, so I bought it. I took one capsule so far — I can’t tell if it did anything or not because I also took MSM, Ibuprofen, and a magnesium supplement today.

The girl at the health store recommended that I try a magnesium/malic acid solution that they sold. She said that a lot of people use it to help with nerve and muscle pain, so I bought a bottle of that while I was there as well. I sure hope that at least one of these things works! I don’t want to be in pain anymore!

Continuing the Lose The Back Pain system

As soon as I am finished writing this post, I am going to do the corrective exercises again and hope that tomorrow I feel better than I do today. I will be taking the magnesium solution as well as MSM each day, and when the Heal-n-Soothe arrives I will start taking that as recommended. I will try not to take too much of the Curamin stuff because I don’t like ingesting phenylalanine, but if it hurts as much as it did today I will probably try taking more of that. The bottle does say ‘Stop Pain Now! – Guaranteed. Experience relief like never before”.

I will continue to do the Lose The Back Pain corrective stretches and exercises and use the Nubax Trio for spinal decompression whenever I can. I’ll do periodic progress reports as I go, and if I come across any miracle cures or new discoveries I’ll be sure to write about them.

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For more information on the Lose The Back Pain system, the Freedom Back, or Heal-n-Soothe, you can visit the healthy back institute which is where I got those three products. The Healthy Back Institute is the overall best back pain and sciatica information resource that I’ve found to date. Click here to visit the Healthy Back Institute.

If you’re a regular reader here I am sure you have noticed that I like to touch on controversial topics in some of my blog posts. That’s because controversial blog posts are the most interesting, and they generate the most discussion — whether the discussion is in the comments threads, facebook, twitter, or on other blogs, a little bit of controversy will always get people thinking, choosing sides, and voicing their opinions.

Hate-mail

Writing about controversial topics will inevitably get you some hate-mail and negative comments, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The hate-mailers and negative commentators actually attract more exposure for your blog posts by encouraging discussion between other commentators who will often message their friends and invite them to join in on the heated debate that is your comment thread.

Dealing with hate-mail is easy. Delete it.

If you feel like reading some of the hate mail you receive, do so with a sense of humor and don’t take anything too personally. Getting upset about hate-mail is a waste of time and gets you thinking negatively. Don’t fall for it! It’s a distraction from what you should really be focusing on.

Don’t get caught up in flame wars in your comment threads or on forums. Flame wars are never a good way to spend your time, they will rarely change anybody’s mind about anything, and they will only eventually lead to you looking stupid for being involved in such a silly internet bickering match. Spend your time writing good articles and doing research, not combatting tards.

No matter how controversial a stance you take, there will always be people who agree with you, too. It’s these people who are important to you as a blogger, they might become loyal fans or subscribers because they feel that what you said in your article was in line with their views on the subject, they may even be very pleased to have found someone who shares a similar point of view. These people will also carry on your flame wars and comment threads for you, so you can focus on producing another awesome article instead of engaging in pointless bickering.

Controversy encourages discussion

Encouraging discussion on your blog is important, and replying to comments and emails is a great way to build a relationship with your readers, but when the comments turn into arguments and flame wars it’s always best to steer clear. Taking part in flame wars is potentially risky business because it could lead to you wasting a ton of time on pointless tasks like replying to trolls, or worse, the trolls could make you look foolish on your own website! You don’t want that, now do you? So my advice is to steer clear of internet flame wars all together, even on your own website.

That said, getting other people to comment and/or talk about your posts on other websites and blogs is one of the best strategies for a blogger trying to attract a loyal readership and lots of traffic. Writing about things that people tend to have strong opinions about is a good way to get the discussion going, but it’s not all butterflies and rainbows.

To take on controversial topics you have to be willing to face people who are strongly opposed to your views, and you have to be prepared to lose some friends once in a while, too. But you’ll also gain a ton of new friends by writing about controversial topics, so I guess it kind of balances out in a way.

It’s kind of fun to watch my facebook and twitter friends lists go up and down each day, depending on what I’ve been posting about, but the effects of controversial blog posts extend beyond the confines of the interweb, too. I have had many real life friends get upset about things I’ve written about on my websites over the years, and I’ve even lost a few of them permanently because of things I’ve said or done online. This is something that new bloggers should be prepared for, and something that experienced bloggers are all too familiar with.

The alternative path

The mainstream lifestyle has always seemed weird to me, I intuitively knew something wasn’t right from a very young age. I’ve always been interested in ‘alternative’ type information and subjects.

On my journey I seem to have been discovering one piece of the puzzle after another, and the ‘alternative path’ makes more and more sense as each piece of the puzzle is fitted in with the rest — in the beginning the individual pieces don’t always make a whole lot of sense, but eventually everything comes together and a bigger picture can be seen.

Because I’ve gone into so many ‘controversial’ areas of information so far in my life I am fairly used to having people disagree with me — sometimes violently. Last summer I was kicked by a random girl at a party for talking about reptilians – haha. But, if you want to blog about controversial issues, you’re going to have to be ready for that kind of opposition from time to time.

Once you start realizing some of the ‘alternative path’ puzzle pieces, you begin to see that the world has been set up intentionally to lead us astray. And it’s been constructed in such a way that it does a very good job at keeping people from the truth. I’m not saying I know the truth, but I’m certainly much closer to it than most. For most people, many of these truths are so far off from what they have been told to believe, that they simply deny them and label it ‘crazy conspiracy theory’ or something similar.

On the surface many of these alternative topics may seem like crazy conspiracy theories, but that’s only because the rest of the puzzle pieces haven’t yet been fitted together to allow the bigger picture to be seen, only then will the puzzle make any sense to the casual observer.

When I was young I was always interested in things like UFOs and ghosts. I’d read tons of books on paranormal things, and liked to think about things that were ‘outside’ of the boring old every day reality. In high school I became interested in less common religious philosophies like the pagan and wiccan religious beliefs, but I soon realized that they were just older versions of the same mind-prison religions of today’s main-stream, and so I basically rejected those as well, opting for my own ever changing belief system as opposed to any organized or ‘official’ religion.

I also became interested in cannabis, and started to realize the amazing potential of the great healing herb. As I learned more and more about cannabis, I started to wonder why it was kept illegal when it was so good. I began to notice that there was a ‘force’ keeping it illegal not because it was bad or dangerous, but because it could bring down the giant pharmaceutical, medical, plastic, pulp & paper, and oil industries all by itself. One single plant could tear down the worlds most corrupted and evil institutions! That’s why it’s been kept illegal!

I started to realize that there was some sort of ‘conspiracy’ if you will, to keep people from waking up to the truth about cannabis, and so I started looking deeper into the who and why of the ‘conspiracy’. I became interested in alternative health topics because they made more sense and are more trustworthy than the ‘science’ behind big pharma and their pill pushing ‘doctors’, many of whom, for the amount of time they spent in school, know virtually nothing about health at all!

I started to adopt a more natural lifestyle which continues to this day. I’m constantly making changes and tweaks to my lifestyle that bring me into better alignment with truth, love, and power. This brings with it far more health and happiness than I’ve ever experienced in the past, and it’s all because of my ‘alternative’ life choices and beliefs.

On my journey I have researched many areas that most people would consider to be controversial, this is why it’s so easy for me to write blog posts that touch on controversial topics without even realizing that what I’m writing about is controversial to begin with! Sometimes I am surprised at the comments I get from people who just can’t seem to understand where I have come up with such a crazy idea when the post is about something that I feel is (or should be) common knowledge and not controversial in the least. I guess I’ve just been so absorbed in my own reality that it seems normal to me, but yet it seems so far from reality to those who subscribe to the mainstream view of things.

This makes it easy for me to create controversy with my blog posts. You will notice a lot more controversy on this website as we move forward, I have tons of stuff I want to write about but have been ‘holding off’ for what feels like the right time to touch on some of the subjects.

If you become a regular reader of my blog, be prepared to read things that you will not agree with, things that will be at odds with your belief system and things that will make you think ‘outside of the box’. In truth, a lot of the times you won’t be ‘outside of the box’ but just in a newer, slightly bigger box from which you will eventually escape — just to find yourself in yet another bigger box. This seems to be the general pattern I have noticed, but eventually we’ll get out of all these boxes and be able to see the bigger picture as a whole — no more boxes to climb out of.

Ultimately, that is my goal with this website. To help people become more conscious and to start thinking outside of their boxes. It’s a long process, but it’s one that must be completed for the betterment of all humanity.

Please now take the time to subscribe to my newsletter so that you can stay up to date on all of my articles. The newsletter comes out every 2 weeks or so and includes new thoughts and articles that I haven’t posted on the website (exclusive subscribers only content), and a list of all of the posts I’ve made since the last issue of the newsletter. It’s a great way to stay up to date and ensure you don’t miss any of my ‘controversial’ posts.

Have a great day!