Pain Management Without a Prescription Pad

Pain is the single most common reason people see a doctor, and it is also the place where honest information is hardest to find. One camp promises that a supplement will do what surgery could not; the other implies that anything without a prescription is superstition. Both are wrong. There is a real, substantial body of clinical research on non-drug pain management — hundreds of randomized trials on exercise, dozens on mind-body therapies, large meta-analyses on acupuncture, respectable studies on a handful of herbs — and it deserves to be read the way a careful patient would read it: what actually helped, how much, for whom, and what turned out to be wishful thinking.

This article walks through the major non-prescription approaches in roughly the order of the evidence behind them, from the ones with the strongest trial support (movement, psychological therapies) to the ones that are useful but modest (heat, cold, TENS, topicals) to the ones that need honest caveats (herbs, magnesium, acupuncture). Along the way it explains why these things work — because once you understand how pain is actually produced, the non-drug toolbox stops looking like folk medicine and starts looking like applied neuroscience. And because honesty cuts both ways, it ends with the situations where self-management is the wrong plan and a medical evaluation is the right one.

Table of Contents

  1. How Pain Actually Works
  2. Movement Is Medicine
  3. Heat and Cold Done Right
  4. The Herbal Anti-Inflammatories, Graded Honestly
  5. Magnesium and Muscle Pain
  6. Omega-3s and Inflammatory Pain
  7. Mind-Body Approaches With Real Trials
  8. Acupuncture, Honestly
  9. Sleep and Pain
  10. TENS and Topicals
  11. When Natural Is Not Enough
  12. Research Papers and References
  13. Connections
  14. Featured Videos

How Pain Actually Works

Here is the most useful fact in all of pain science: pain is not a measurement of tissue damage. It is an alarm produced by your nervous system. The two usually track together — step on a nail and you hurt — but they can, and often do, come apart.

The raw signal is called nociception: specialized nerve endings throughout your body detect threatening events (crushing, burning, chemical irritation) and fire messages toward the spinal cord. But nociception is not pain. Pain is what your brain constructs after weighing that incoming signal against everything else it knows — where you are, what you expect, how you slept, how frightened you are. Soldiers with serious wounds sometimes report little pain until the battle ends; a person convinced a nail went through their foot can be in agony before discovering it passed harmlessly between the toes. Neither is imagining anything. The alarm system simply has settings, and the settings matter as much as the signal.

The first hard proof of this came in 1965, when Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall published the gate control theory in Science. In plain language: the spinal cord contains a kind of gate that decides how much nociceptive signal gets through to the brain. Signals from ordinary touch — rubbing, pressure, warmth, vibration — travel on faster nerve fibers and can partially close that gate, muting the pain traffic trying to pass. That is why you instinctively rub a banged elbow, why a hand pressed on a cramping belly helps, and why TENS units, menthol rubs, and heat packs are more than distraction. You can watch the mechanism run in our interactive pain gate animation, where you can open and close the gate yourself.

The second key idea: acute pain and chronic pain are different conditions, almost different diseases. Acute pain is the alarm working as designed — tissue is injured, the alarm sounds, healing proceeds, the alarm quiets. Chronic pain (usually defined as pain persisting beyond about three months, past normal healing time) is frequently a problem with the alarm system itself. The tissue may have healed long ago, yet the alarm keeps ringing.

The mechanism behind much of this is called central sensitization, and the plainest way to say it is: the volume knob gets turned up and stuck there. Nerves in the spinal cord and brain that relay pain become more excitable with repeated use — they fire more easily, recruit neighbors, and stop filtering. Two things follow that patients recognize instantly: ordinary sensations start to hurt (bed sheets on skin, a light touch on the back — doctors call this allodynia), and things that should hurt a little hurt a lot (hyperalgesia). Fibromyalgia is the textbook example of a condition dominated by central sensitization, but the process contributes to long-standing back pain, osteoarthritis pain, and many others. This is why several of the best-proven non-drug treatments — graded exercise, sleep repair, mind-body training — work not by fixing a joint but by turning the volume knob back down. That is not a consolation prize. It is treating the actual disease.

Movement Is Medicine

If the entire non-drug toolbox had to be reduced to one item, this is the one. For chronic musculoskeletal pain, exercise has more randomized-trial support than any other treatment of any kind — drug or non-drug. The 2021 Cochrane review of exercise for chronic low back pain alone pooled over two hundred randomized trials with roughly 25,000 participants and concluded that exercise reduces pain and improves function compared with no treatment or usual care. The improvements are moderate, not miraculous — but they are consistent, they come with side benefits instead of side effects, and they grow with time.

The story of how medicine learned this is worth telling, because it is a story of experts being wrong in the intuitive direction. For most of the twentieth century, the standard prescription for back pain was bed rest — sometimes weeks of it. It seemed obvious: injured things should be rested. Then randomized trials actually compared bed rest against advice to stay active, and the results ran the other way. People told to keep moving recovered somewhat faster, hurt somewhat less, and returned to work sooner; those put to bed stiffened, weakened, lost confidence in their backs, and did slightly worse. Cochrane reviews of those trials closed the case, and no modern guideline anywhere recommends bed rest for ordinary back pain. The lesson generalizes: a sore body part usually needs graded loading, not protection.

Why does movement treat pain? Several mechanisms at once: exercise triggers the body's own descending pain-inhibition circuits (the same ones opioid drugs hijack), releases endogenous analgesic chemicals, improves blood flow and tissue tolerance, de-sensitizes the nervous system to feared movements, and directly counters the deconditioning spiral — hurt, so move less, so weaken, so hurt more — that traps so many people with chronic pain.

The practical method is graded exercise, and the word "graded" is doing all the work:

If self-directed exercise stalls, or fear of movement has taken hold, a good physical therapist is the professional version of everything above — assessment, a graded plan, hands-on symptom relief to make the exercise tolerable, and coaching past the fear. Our Physical Therapy page covers what good PT looks like and how to tell it from a passive-modality mill.

Heat and Cold Done Right

Temperature is the oldest analgesic in the world, it is nearly free, and used correctly it genuinely helps — mostly by working the pain gate and changing blood flow. The trick is matching the tool to the problem.

Cold is the better choice for a fresh injury — the sprained ankle, the pulled muscle, the first day or two after a strain. Cold slows nerve conduction (numbing the area), constricts blood vessels, and limits the throbbing of acute inflammation. Fifteen to twenty minutes with a thin cloth between ice and skin, repeated every couple of hours, is the standard method. One honest caveat from recent sports-medicine research: cold is excellent pain relief, but whether aggressive icing actually speeds tissue healing has come under real doubt — even the physician who coined the RICE protocol later walked back the "ice everything" advice, since inflammation is also the first stage of repair. Ice for comfort, not as a healing accelerant. The full story, including whole-body cryotherapy chambers, is on our Cryotherapy page.

Heat is the better choice for stiffness, muscle tension, spasm, and chronic aches — the tight trapezius, the cranky lower back, arthritic joints in the morning. Heat dilates blood vessels, relaxes muscle, makes connective tissue more pliable, and feeds soothing warm-fiber traffic into the pain gate. Continuous low-level heat wraps for low back pain have modest but real randomized-trial support — comparable in the short term to over-the-counter pain relievers in some trials. Twenty to thirty minutes of a heating pad or a warm bath, warm rather than scalding, and never sleep on a heating pad.

Contrast therapy — alternating heat and cold, classically in water immersion — is popular with athletes for post-exercise soreness. The proposed mechanism (alternate vasodilation and constriction acting as a circulatory pump) is plausible, the trial evidence is modest and mixed, and the practice is pleasant and low-risk. Details on protocols and evidence are on the Contrast Therapy page.

A serviceable rule of thumb: fresh and swollen → cold; stiff and tight → heat; when in doubt, use whichever feels better — both are legitimate gate-closers, and for non-acute pain the comfort itself is the therapy. Skip both over skin with poor sensation or poor circulation (advanced diabetes, vascular disease), where burns and frostbite happen silently.

The Herbal Anti-Inflammatories, Graded Honestly

A handful of plants contain genuinely active anti-inflammatory and analgesic compounds — aspirin itself was reverse-engineered from one of them. None of them matches the potency of prescription drugs, several carry real cautions, and the trial evidence ranges from respectable to thin. Here is the honest grading.

Willow bark — the best pedigree. Willow bark's active compound, salicin, is converted in the body to salicylic acid — the parent molecule of aspirin, which chemists first synthesized as a gentler derivative of the willow extract doctors were already using. The evidence is more than historical: in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of 210 people with low back pain published in The American Journal of Medicine (Chrubasik and colleagues, 2000), a standardized extract delivering 240 mg of salicin daily left roughly four in ten patients pain-free in the final week, versus fewer than one in ten on placebo. Because it travels the aspirin pathway, it inherits the aspirin cautions: do not combine with blood thinners or NSAIDs, avoid it entirely with aspirin allergy, ulcers, or bleeding disorders, and never give it to children or teenagers with viral illness (Reye's syndrome risk).

Turmeric / curcumin — real signal, with a bioavailability asterisk. Curcumin, the yellow pigment in turmeric, inhibits several inflammatory pathways (including NF-κB signaling) in the lab, and a 2016 systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized trials (Daily and colleagues, Journal of Medicinal Food) found that roughly 1,000 mg per day of curcumin for 8–12 weeks meaningfully reduced arthritis pain — in a few small head-to-head trials, in the same range as NSAIDs — while noting the trials were few and small. The asterisk: plain curcumin is absorbed terribly. Kitchen turmeric powder is only a few percent curcumin, and what you swallow is rapidly broken down and excreted. The positive trials used concentrated extracts, usually formulated for absorption (with piperine from black pepper, or bound to phospholipids). If you try it, use a standardized enhanced-absorption extract, give it two to three months, and skip it if you take blood thinners (curcumin has antiplatelet activity) or have gallstones or biliary obstruction.

Boswellia — the quiet performer for osteoarthritis. Boswellia serrata resin (frankincense) contains boswellic acids that inhibit 5-lipoxygenase, an inflammatory enzyme NSAIDs do not touch. A 2020 systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized trials in osteoarthritis (Yu and colleagues, BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies) found that standardized boswellia extracts improved pain, stiffness, and joint function versus placebo, with benefits emerging by about four weeks; studied doses of enriched extracts were commonly in the 100–250 mg-per-day range. Side effects in trials were mild, mostly digestive. Of the arthritis herbs, this one is probably the most underrated relative to its evidence.

Ginger — modest and safe. Randomized trials in knee osteoarthritis, pooled in meta-analyses, show a small but statistically real reduction in pain at roughly 0.5–1 g of ginger extract daily — smaller than the effect of NSAIDs, larger than placebo, with mild stomach upset as the main complaint. Reasonable as an add-on; do not expect it to carry the load alone.

Capsaicin — effective for localized pain, if you survive the courtship. Capsaicin, the heat of chili peppers, works by a genuinely clever mechanism: it stimulates the TRPV1 receptors on pain fibers so relentlessly that the fibers deplete their signaling chemicals and stop transmitting — the nerve endings are temporarily exhausted into silence. The catch is the burning-in period nobody warns you about: over-the-counter creams (0.025–0.075%) must be applied three to four times daily, they burn on application, and the burning typically persists for one to two weeks of consistent use before fading as relief arrives. Most people who say "capsaicin didn't work" quit during the burn. Wear gloves or wash hands thoroughly — capsaicin in the eye is an unforgettable education. It suits localized problems: an arthritic knee or thumb, a patch of nerve pain. (A single-application high-concentration 8% patch for nerve pain exists but is a clinic procedure — a Cochrane review found it gives meaningful relief to a minority of patients with certain neuropathic conditions.)

Arnica — mostly folklore at this point. See the TENS and Topicals section; the short version is that homeopathic arnica is water, and herbal arnica gels have small, mixed trials for bruising and osteoarthritis.

One overarching caution: "natural" anti-inflammatories that actually work do so through the same kinds of biochemical pathways as drugs, which is precisely why they can interact with drugs. Willow bark and curcumin both matter to anyone on anticoagulants; tell your physician and pharmacist what you take, in the same breath as your prescriptions.

Magnesium and Muscle Pain

Magnesium sits at the junction of real physiology and inflated marketing, so it is worth being precise about both halves.

The real physiology: magnesium is required for normal muscle relaxation — it counterbalances calcium in the contraction cycle and damps excitatory signaling at nerve endings (including NMDA receptors involved in pain amplification). Genuine magnesium deficiency causes exactly the symptoms you would predict: cramps, twitches, muscle tension, and irritability of nerves and muscle — and a large fraction of people eating a modern refined diet take in less than the recommended amount (roughly 310–420 mg daily for adults, from food such as leafy greens, nuts, seeds, legumes, and whole grains like brown rice). Certain situations reliably drain magnesium: proton-pump inhibitors taken long-term, many diuretics, heavy alcohol use, poorly controlled diabetes, and chronic diarrhea or gut malabsorption.

The honest trial result: for the most common cramp complaint — ordinary nighttime leg cramps in older adults without a known deficiency — a Cochrane review (Garrison and colleagues, 2020) concluded that magnesium supplements are unlikely to provide a meaningful benefit. That is the pattern to internalize for many nutrients: correcting a real deficiency can be transformative; adding more to a body that already has enough usually does little.

Practical guidance, with that pattern in mind:

Omega-3s and Inflammatory Pain

The long-chain omega-3 fats EPA and DHA, from fatty fish and fish oil, are built into the resolution phase of inflammation: the body converts them into signaling molecules (resolvins and related compounds) that actively wind inflammation down, and they compete with the omega-6 fats that feed the more inflammatory eicosanoid pathways. That mechanism is not hypothetical, and for inflammatory joint pain it has been tested in a respectable stack of randomized trials.

The clearest case is rheumatoid arthritis, and the honest summary has three parts. First: a meta-analysis of randomized trials (Goldberg and Katz, Pain, 2007) found that fish-oil supplementation reduced patient-reported joint pain, shortened morning stiffness, reduced the number of painful joints, and lowered NSAID use. Second, the fine print that determines whether it works for you: the benefit required at least 2.7 grams of EPA+DHA per day, taken for at least 12 weeks — a genuinely high dose (several standard capsules, or a teaspoon-plus of concentrated liquid oil) sustained for a genuinely long time. The typical "one fish oil softgel daily for two weeks" experiment tests a fraction of the studied dose for a fraction of the studied duration, and its failure tells you nothing. Third, the boundary that must be stated plainly: omega-3s improve RA symptoms; they do not slow the joint erosion of the disease itself. Rheumatoid arthritis destroys joints through an autoimmune process that fish oil does not stop — that is the job of disease-modifying drugs (DMARDs), and delaying them while trying supplements costs joint tissue that does not grow back. Omega-3s belong alongside disease-modifying treatment, easing symptoms and NSAID reliance — never in place of it. Our Rheumatoid Arthritis page covers the full treatment picture.

Beyond RA, the evidence gets thinner and more mixed: some trials and pooled analyses suggest modest benefit in osteoarthritis and other joint pain, others find little, and no confident dose claim can be made. For general anti-inflammatory nutrition, eating fatty fish (salmon, sardines, herring, mackerel) two to three times weekly is the defensible baseline. When buying supplements, read the label for the actual EPA+DHA content — not the "total fish oil" number, which can be three times higher. High-dose fish oil has mild blood-thinning activity, so surgical patients and anyone on anticoagulants should involve their physician. The full story is on the Omega-3 Fatty Acids page.

Mind-Body Approaches With Real Trials

Let's disarm the objection first, because it keeps people away from some of the best-proven treatments in this article: recommending psychological therapy for pain does not mean the pain is imaginary, exaggerated, or your fault. Recall the first section — pain is an output of the nervous system, and in chronic pain the processing machinery itself is sensitized. Mind-body therapies are training programs for that machinery. Saying meditation can reduce pain is a statement about neurophysiology — brain-imaging studies show these practices change activity in pain-processing regions — not a statement that you were making it up. Nobody tells an athlete that training their nervous system to perform is "all in their head."

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is the most-studied psychological treatment for chronic pain. It targets the amplifiers: catastrophic interpretation ("this twinge means my spine is crumbling"), fear-driven avoidance of movement, boom-and-bust activity cycling, and the mood spiral. The Cochrane review of psychological therapies for chronic pain (Williams and colleagues, 2020, spanning 75 trials) found CBT produces small-to-moderate improvements in pain, disability, and distress — effects comparable in size to common pain medications, without the pharmacology, and more durable.

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) trains a different skill: observing sensations without the alarm-and-bracing reaction that amplifies them. Its flagship trial is hard to argue with — a randomized trial of 342 adults with chronic low back pain published in JAMA (Cherkin and colleagues, 2016) compared MBSR, CBT, and usual care: at six months, roughly six in ten participants in the MBSR and CBT groups had clinically meaningful functional improvement, versus about four in ten with usual care, with gains persisting at one year. MBSR matched the gold-standard psychological therapy — and both beat ordinary care. Our Meditation page covers how to actually start.

Slow breathing practices are the accessible entry point. Breathing at around six breaths per minute with long exhales engages the vagal/baroreflex machinery that damps sympathetic arousal — and pain rides on arousal: a braced, adrenalized body feeds the gate from above. Small experimental studies show slow breathing can measurably reduce pain sensitivity; the evidence base is younger and thinner than CBT's, but the cost is zero and the effect on the tension-pain loop is something you can feel in minutes. Techniques are on the Breathwork page.

The honest expectation for all of these: they rarely switch pain off. What the trials show is people hurting somewhat less, functioning notably more, and unhooking from the fear that makes pain rule a life. For a condition medicine often cannot cure, that is not a soft outcome — it is the outcome.

Acupuncture, Honestly

Acupuncture is where evidence-based medicine and its critics have argued longest, so here is the large-trial picture without either side's spin.

The best data come from the Acupuncture Trialists' Collaboration, which pooled individual patient data — a stricter method than ordinary meta-analysis — from 39 high-quality randomized trials totaling around 20,800 patients with chronic back or neck pain, osteoarthritis, or chronic headache (Vickers and colleagues, The Journal of Pain, 2018). Three findings matter:

  1. Acupuncture beat no-acupuncture care (usual care or waiting list) by a clearly meaningful margin — on the order of half a standard deviation of pain improvement.
  2. Acupuncture also beat sham acupuncture (retractable needles or needling "wrong" points) — so there is a real, statistically robust specific effect — but this margin was much smaller. In plain terms: a substantial share of the benefit patients experience comes from the context — the ritual, the expectation, the hands-on attention — and a smaller share from the needling itself.
  3. The benefit was durable, with about 90% of it still present a year after treatment ended.

Both camps have to give ground to that dataset. "It's pure placebo" is not accurate — sham-controlled superiority, replicated across dozens of trials, is precisely what a pure placebo cannot show. "It rebalances qi and treats everything" is not supported either — the specific effect is modest, concentrated in chronic musculoskeletal pain and headache, and largely indifferent to the elaborate point-selection theory. What remains is a fair, useful conclusion: for chronic back pain, neck pain, and knee osteoarthritis, acupuncture produces modest, real, lasting relief, with an excellent safety record in licensed hands. Serious adverse events are rare with sterile single-use needles and trained practitioners. A reasonable trial is six to eight sessions; if nothing has shifted by then, more needles are unlikely to change the answer. Costs, what a session is like, and the conditions with the best evidence are on the Acupuncture page.

Sleep and Pain

Pain and sleep form a genuinely vicious circle, but here is the finding that should change how you attack it: the arrow from bad sleep to pain is at least as strong as the arrow from pain to bad sleep — probably stronger. A major review of the longitudinal research (Finan, Goodin, and Smith, The Journal of Pain, 2013) concluded that sleep disturbance predicts the development of new chronic pain and the worsening of existing pain more reliably than pain predicts sleep problems. Experimental studies point the same way: deprive healthy volunteers of sleep — especially deep sleep — and their pain thresholds drop measurably the next day; some develop diffuse muscle aching with no injury at all.

The mechanism connects back to central sensitization: sleep is when the nervous system recalibrates. Sleep loss ramps up inflammatory signaling, impairs the brain's descending pain-inhibition circuits, and turns the amplifier up. One rough but well-replicated rule from this literature: after a bad night, pain is louder — and it is the same tissue. Knowing that alone defuses some of the alarm ("my back is worse, the damage must be spreading" becomes "I slept four hours; the volume knob is up today").

Practically, this makes sleep a treatment target, not a casualty:

TENS and Topicals

TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) is the gate control theory sold as a battery-powered gadget: pads on the skin deliver a tingling current that floods the fast touch fibers and closes the spinal gate on pain traffic. The evidence, stated honestly, is mixed in an instructive way. A 2022 meta-analysis of 381 randomized studies (Johnson and colleagues, BMJ Open) found moderate-certainty evidence that TENS reduces pain intensity during and immediately after use compared with placebo devices. What the literature has never convincingly shown is lasting relief that persists after the unit is off, and older Cochrane reviews on chronic-pain TENS repeatedly judged the long-term evidence insufficient. So the fair framing: TENS is a genuine but temporary gate-closer — a way to get through a painful evening, take the edge off enough to exercise, or reduce pill reliance — not a cure. Units cost little, side effects are minor (skin irritation), and it is worth an experiment for most chronic musculoskeletal pain. Skip it with a pacemaker or implanted defibrillator, and involve your obstetric provider before use in pregnancy.

Menthol rubs (and camphor, methyl salicylate liniments) are counterirritants: they activate cooling receptors and feed exactly the kind of competing sensation the pain gate responds to. Relief is real, immediate, and short — useful before sleep or activity. Menthol is honest about what it is; nobody claims the tube heals anything.

Arnica needs a split verdict. Homeopathic arnica pellets and creams are diluted past the point of containing meaningful active ingredient; trials show what chemistry predicts — nothing beyond placebo. Herbal arnica gels (actual plant extract) have a handful of small trials in bruising and hand/knee osteoarthritis with modest, inconsistent positive results. If you use it, use a real extract gel on unbroken skin only — arnica taken internally is toxic.

Capsaicin cream, the most evidence-backed OTC topical for localized joint and nerve pain, is covered with its burning-in period in the herbal section.

Topicals earn a permanent place in the toolbox for one under-appreciated reason: they put the medicine where the pain is with almost none in the bloodstream — which makes them one of the safest categories here for older adults already juggling prescriptions.

When Natural Is Not Enough

Self-management rests on one assumption: that the pain, however miserable, is not the signature of a dangerous underlying process. Usually that assumption is correct. The red flags below are the patterns where it may not be — any of these means see a physician promptly rather than reaching further into the natural toolbox:

And one more piece of honesty, because a site about natural remedies owes it to you: over-the-counter analgesics, used correctly, are reasonable tools, and "natural-first" was never supposed to mean "drug-never." An NSAID at the lowest effective dose for a short course during a flare — taken with food, avoided by people with kidney disease, ulcers, heart failure, or on blood thinners, and used cautiously past age 65 — is a legitimate part of sensible self-care, often precisely what makes the exercise program tolerable enough to start. Acetaminophen is gentler on the stomach and kidneys but has a narrow ceiling: staying at or under 3,000–4,000 mg per day (lower with regular alcohol use or liver disease) is essential, and the classic accident is not recklessness but stacking — taking acetaminophen tablets on top of a cold-and-flu or prescription combination product that already contains it. That failure mode, and why it matters so much, is laid out on our Acetaminophen Overdose page. Meanwhile, unmanaged severe pain is not a neutral "toughing it out" — ongoing high-intensity pain is itself a driver of the central sensitization that turns acute pain chronic. Use the gentlest thing that works; but do use something that works.

Research Papers and References

Every reference below was verified against the publisher's registry; links open the original paper's DOI record in a new tab.

  1. Melzack R, Wall PD. Pain Mechanisms: A New Theory. Science, 1965. doi:10.1126/science.150.3699.971 — the original gate control theory paper.
  2. Hayden JA, Ellis J, Ogilvie R, et al. Exercise therapy for chronic low back pain. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2021. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD009790.pub2
  3. Dahm KT, Brurberg KG, Jamtvedt G, Hagen KB. Advice to rest in bed versus advice to stay active for acute low-back pain and sciatica. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2010. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD007612.pub2
  4. Chrubasik S, Eisenberg E, Balan E, et al. Treatment of low back pain exacerbations with willow bark extract: a randomized double-blind study. The American Journal of Medicine, 2000. doi:10.1016/S0002-9343(00)00442-3
  5. Daily JW, Yang M, Park S. Efficacy of Turmeric Extracts and Curcumin for Alleviating the Symptoms of Joint Arthritis: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Clinical Trials. Journal of Medicinal Food, 2016. doi:10.1089/jmf.2016.3705
  6. Yu G, Xiang W, Zhang T, et al. Effectiveness of Boswellia and Boswellia extract for osteoarthritis patients: a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, 2020. doi:10.1186/s12906-020-02985-6
  7. Garrison SR, Korownyk CS, Kolber MR, et al. Magnesium for skeletal muscle cramps. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2020. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD009402.pub3
  8. Goldberg RJ, Katz J. A meta-analysis of the analgesic effects of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid supplementation for inflammatory joint pain. Pain, 2007. doi:10.1016/j.pain.2007.01.020
  9. Williams ACdeC, Fisher E, Hearn L, Eccleston C. Psychological therapies for the management of chronic pain (excluding headache) in adults. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2020. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD007407.pub4
  10. Cherkin DC, Sherman KJ, Balderson BH, et al. Effect of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction vs Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or Usual Care on Back Pain and Functional Limitations in Adults With Chronic Low Back Pain: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA, 2016. doi:10.1001/jama.2016.2323
  11. Vickers AJ, Vertosick EA, Lewith G, et al. Acupuncture for Chronic Pain: Update of an Individual Patient Data Meta-Analysis. The Journal of Pain, 2018. doi:10.1016/j.jpain.2017.11.005
  12. Johnson MI, Paley CA, Jones G, et al. Efficacy and safety of transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) for acute and chronic pain in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis of 381 studies. BMJ Open, 2022. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2021-051073

Connections

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