Tip for chronic-pain issues
Okay, this is going to sound absolutely crazy, but please, hear me out:
If you have chronic pain of the muscle/stiffness sort, or suffer from muscle cramps in the middle of the night that wake you, start sleeping with an unwrapped bar of soap in bed with you.
...I can see that this is going to take some explanation.
See, Monday night I was griping to
miella that I was going to be in agony when I woke up, since I had been pushing myself really hard that day, and she told me the soap thing. Her mom learned it in school, and apparently everyone scoffed until they tried it and then came back in spluttering and demanding to know why it worked. "Why does it work?" I asked. She had no idea. The only thing they've discovered over the years is that it can't be one of the 'D' soaps: no Dove, no Dial. Everything else should work. (Personally I would suspect that none of the glycerine soaps would work, but that's just from my own suspicion about what the soap is doing.)
I figured at best it had to be a placebo, but hey, the placebo effect is still improvement. So I tried it Monday night ... and woke up feeling better than I had in a while. Placebo, I decided. But then, the soap fell out of the bed at some point Wednesday night, and even before I noticed that it had, I woke up Thursday morning in agony.
So, yeah. Soap. I have no idea why it works. (I'm actually suspecting that something in the soap interacts with the pain messages to the brain, absorbed through the skin. But hey, I could be totally wrong. Especially since Googling the trick reveals that some people put the soap under their fitted sheet to keep it in the bed with them.)
On Dreamwidth:
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If you have chronic pain of the muscle/stiffness sort, or suffer from muscle cramps in the middle of the night that wake you, start sleeping with an unwrapped bar of soap in bed with you.
...I can see that this is going to take some explanation.
See, Monday night I was griping to
miella that I was going to be in agony when I woke up, since I had been pushing myself really hard that day, and she told me the soap thing. Her mom learned it in school, and apparently everyone scoffed until they tried it and then came back in spluttering and demanding to know why it worked. "Why does it work?" I asked. She had no idea. The only thing they've discovered over the years is that it can't be one of the 'D' soaps: no Dove, no Dial. Everything else should work. (Personally I would suspect that none of the glycerine soaps would work, but that's just from my own suspicion about what the soap is doing.)
I figured at best it had to be a placebo, but hey, the placebo effect is still improvement. So I tried it Monday night ... and woke up feeling better than I had in a while. Placebo, I decided. But then, the soap fell out of the bed at some point Wednesday night, and even before I noticed that it had, I woke up Thursday morning in agony.
So, yeah. Soap. I have no idea why it works. (I'm actually suspecting that something in the soap interacts with the pain messages to the brain, absorbed through the skin. But hey, I could be totally wrong. Especially since Googling the trick reveals that some people put the soap under their fitted sheet to keep it in the bed with them.)
On Dreamwidth:
comments | comment (OpenID)