Knee Pain Update

It’s too early to tell if the ginger root is doing the job but my knee has been fine for a week without the Diclofenac. The problem may have been taken care of with the drug; it’s too early to tell. I have been making a soy milk shake with fruit and a hunk of fresh ginger every morning for a week. On some days I’ll make a tea with ginger extract. It’s pretty nasty but whatever. I plan to keep up this routine.

I’m pretty skeptical about some of the claims made about ginger by hippies on the internet. I haven’t found anything really conclusive about the benefits of ginger for arthritis knee pain. The stuff I find is either luke-warm stuff from the medical community or it is touted as a miracle cure by hippy health food people. The medical profession has little to gain if arthritis can be treated by a cheap herbal remedy so I imagine we’ll never hear much from doctors on this topic. The people claiming ginger is some sort of miracle probably also believe in astrology. I have no stake in this personally except to be free from knee pain. I have no reason to be anything other than completely objective about what I discover about ginger.

All that I can say thus far is, “So far, so good.” I am just so fucking relieved, mentally, to be free of pain that I can’t even describe my happiness. I am back into my super push-up routine again and yesterday I hit my mark of 1,000. I try to do sets of 100, at least at first. To my credit, yesterday my friend’s four year old daughter was on my back for my first 50 push-ups which sort of killed me right from the start (and she’s big for four). As I have said before, this routine isn’t difficult to do. What is difficult is the discipline to make yourself actually do it every three days or so. It’s more boring than difficult, at least after you get into it. I feel stronger already. Push-ups are a terrific exercise and I don’t get any adverse reaction from them like when I do a lot of pull-ups. After a few weeks of pull-ups my elbows start to ache.

I’ve been walking quite a bit more than usual. I really hate walking but I need to balance out all of the cycling that I do. I joke a lot about my diet and all of the pork I consume but I think my diet is pretty healthy, for the most part. I eat lots of fresh fruits and raw vegetables and almost no sugar. I have no weakness for sweets; salty shit is another story but I don’t go overboard. I should eat less meat and dairy. Probably too much booze in my diet but once again, I don’t go overboard—at least not too often. I should smoke dope instead, but although I like pot, it doesn’t really suit me and isn’t the same thing at all as beer or wine. I’d wager that there is a book out there on this subject, Control One Vice with Another. I’ve always been so glad that I have never smoked cigarettes—one of the world’s worse vices.