Pain is for most people in the world absolutely no fun. Pain medications work in the brain to shut off the signals from the body to the brain that something hurts, so as a general rule I don’t want to use them. I want to know when something hurts so that I can do something about it. Sometimes, however, pain medications are vital. There have been very few instances in which I have found it necessary to use heavy duty pain medication since I developed a more holistic approach to life, but one of those instances happened when I got shingles. I thought I was coming apart at the seams. It was during one of the most stressful periods of my life when I was preparing for my National Board Examinations that I woke up one morning with a very odd tingling feeling on my right side and just a few hours later felt excruciating pain in the same area. The pain was indescribable and my skin looked normal. No redness was there. No scratches were there. Nothing was evident that would be a logical cause for this horrible pain I was feeling. I went to an instructor of differential diagnosis at school and asked her what she thought. As it turned out she told me it sounded to her that I was getting shingles. Lo and behold, the next day a rash appeared and I could not bear even to have the weight of a bed sheet on the skin in the area of the rash. Misery was mine. I had never felt any pain like this before and thought that I would surely die.
Shingles is caused by the same virus that causes chicken pox. If you have ever had chicken pox, the virus lies dormant in the nerve roots near your spine and might lie dormant forever, never causing a moment’s worry beyond the initial outbreak of chicken pox. However, in certain cases the virus can be reactivated. Certain illnesses, aging, and periods of high stress can all cause a reactivation of the chicken pox virus. If the chicken pox virus (herpes zoster) becomes reactivated it causes shingles rather than another case of chicken pox. Shingles causes neuralgia, or nerve pain, that can be severe. It also causes a rash which develops usually on only one side of the body since shingles follows a dermatome, or nerve pattern, on the skin. The rash will develop into blisters in a day or so, and it can take weeks for the blisters to heal. The time during the healing is usually a very painful one, and at certain times the blisters can be contagious to others. If others who have not been exposed to the chicken pox virus are infected with the virus during an active stage of shingles, though, the condition that erupts will be chicken pox and not shingles.
Treatment of shingles is difficult. There are some antiviral medications on the market today, but shingles is hard to predict if you have never felt the initial symptoms before. The antiviral medications can reduce pain and the otherwise untreated duration of the shingles outbreak, but will not prevent the condition from developing. When I had my experience with shingles seven years ago I saw a medical doctor who gave me narcotic pain relievers in order for me to get enough relief to go to sleep. Just turning over in bed was excruciating, and I could not sleep because I was afraid to have a need to turn over during the night. Aveeno oatmeal baths were very helpful in relieving the itching as the rash healed. Aveeno also helped in drying up the spots so that they would go away sooner. A friend of mine in school was very involved in Chinese medicine and gave me some awful smelling salve that made me feel better if only temporarily. I tried everything. The last thing I tried was, I believe, the very best treatment of all. One of my nutrition professors told me that an amino acid called L-Lysine when combined with vitamin C was extremely successful in speeding up the rate at which the virus returned to dormancy. I raced off to the health food store and loaded my basket with Lysine and vitamin C and began a regimen of that. Within two days the pain was completely gone. The actual rash took a bit longer to heal completely, but the unpleasant symptoms that I was having were resolved. I finally was able to sleep without the numbing medication. I have since run into other people who have reinforced the opinion that the Lysine cure works. It certainly seemed to help me, and if I even think that I feel anything that closely resembles the tingling precursor to shingles, I immediately begin taking it again for a few days until I think the coast is clear.
You might be at risk for shingles if you have ever had chicken pox and are over the age of 50, have any autoimmune disorder, have any immune system weakening disease, or are under excessive amounts of stress. The early symptoms include flu-like symptoms without the fever of the flu, unexplained itching, tingling, or extreme pain in an area where a rash will develop a few days later. Get educated about it and pay attention to your body. If there is no reason for you not to take Lysine or vitamin C, try it. It is better to try the combination of them than to endure the misery of shingles. Treat your body well.