Aching joints? My knee woke me up every night but now I may have found a cure

Last night was an unusual one for me. My usually painful right knee wasn't painful.

I've been scratching my head all day as to what I had changed, and I've only come up with one thing.

The results seem too immediate. Could this simple change be associated with my pain relief?

I was concerned cancer may have spread

For the last ten years or so, I have had pains in and around my right knee. Sometimes the pains seem to run in parallel with the bones attaching to my knee - in a kind of "straight line" down the outside of my leg.

The pain is not so much in the knee as "around the knee" and in the bones that attach to it. 

The pain wakes me up often in the night. I then move my knee, and the pain dies down. So I end up having to move my right knee many times each night.

Once I move my knee, the pain eases. So I can exercise and even run regularly and intensely. I do feel it a little starting out, but I take things carefully, and when I am warmed up, I rarely notice any pain.

As I have had cancer previously, I was initially concerned that these aches might have been signs of the cancer spreading to the bones. Bone aches are primary sign when this happens - it's called bone metastasis.

I mentioned it to my local doctor. He sent me for various blood tests and scans - all yielding no insights. 

As the doctor was considering the next move, he came across unrelated cancer that required urgent surgery. That took the focus off my aching right leg, and I didn't raise the pain again with the doctor.

But it still kept waking me every night - up until last night.

Green and ginger tea found to reduce arthritis pain

The only thing that has changed in the last few days has been that I started drinking green tea. That was on Monday, two days ago. Yesterday I added ginger and lemon tea - mixed with green tea.

Surprisingly there is research that found ginger relieves the pains of arthritis! In one controlled test, the group who consumed green tea extract reported "significant reduction" in pain.

Another study found that ginger extract was as effective as ibuprofen. 

Green tea has also been found to reduce inflammation associated with arthritis. 

In a February 2018 study, in the medical journal Clinical Nutrition, doctors suggest that a 4-week course of green tea extract might well be considered as an adjunctive treatment both for control of pain and for the betterment of knee joint physical function in adults with osteoarthritis.

Researchers also found that tumeric helps relieve inflammation and relieve joint pain. For me, this doesn’t explain the change as I already take tumeric daily. It is not stopping my aching knee, but I believe that it is otherwise a useful supplement. 

By the way tumeric is a member of the ginger family, Zingiberaceae, so there is a connection between its medicinal properties and those of ginger.

Several other teas have also been found to help relieve arthritis symptoms.

Time will tell ...

Could it be that my new tea-drinking initiative is responsible? Time will tell.

In the meantime, if you would like to try, here are some suggestions:

1. Buy quality green tea and have several glasses daily. I'm not sure it matters if it is Indian, Chinese or Japanese. It is the catechins that are the active ingredient, and they seem to relate to the process of making green tea rather than the variety.
2. For ginger, you can use ginger tea powder or include fresh ginger root or dried ginger powder in your daily diet. To prepare ginger tea, cut up a small piece of ginger root, boil it in a cup of water for 10 minutes and strain it. To improve the taste, you can sweeten it with honey. - I don't as I like the natural taste.
3. And add tumeric. I add it to my morning cereal, and to half an avocado that I eat each day. For tumeric to be absorbed you have to have pepper present in your stomach, so add pepper where you add tumeric.

I'm hoping that my pain-free nights continue, and I'll update this post in due course with a report of progress.

If you have similar aches and try the green tea and ginger tea combination, I'd love to hear about your results.

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