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When I moved to a sleepy tourism/retirement community in the mountains of Arkansas, I was forty nine years old and semi-retired. I still dabbled in cartooning and designing, but was more interested in fishing and playing tennis. I had had a very active first part of my life from marathon running to teaching martial arts to skydiving and just about everything in between. Even though I’d experienced some horrendous accidents in my youth, I healed rapidly and experienced no painful post-event effects. So when I made my big move to slow down and learn to enjoy life, I was in for a quite a shock. The first few years were virtually pain-free. I occasionally had a few minor aches and pains that I’m told “come with aging”, but nothing to get all in a huff about. At age forty-nine I experienced a major heart attack. This was a bit shocking because even though I’d quit long distance running, and finally quit running altogether due to some knee and leg injuries that did not bother me when I got here, but were starting to bother me after I got here. So being in the mountains, I decided mountain walking and hiking might do just as well. I was a stickler with my lifestyle including all kinds of good healthy foods (or so I thought). When those “good healthy foods” brought on a second major heart attack (this one that came closer to killing me), I decided to get on the net and do some research. My wife had already switched her “good healthy diet” to vegetarian and finally vegan lifestyle, and went even further to a 90% raw vegan lifestyle. I decided to follow suite and within less than a year, I was mountain climbing and hiking with her, whereas a year earlier I could barely get across the living room. But something else was happening that was interfering with my life and hiking and no doctors or dentists seemed to know how to remedy the issues. I had developed tennis elbow (tendonitis) which most people don’t think of as a serious pain issue, and a gum disorder (not to mention teeth going bad) but the gum disorder (most likely neuralgia) was so painful I could barely eat. I was able to go to the occupational therapist and get 3 times a week treatment which lasted about 3-5 months. That didn’t cut the cake for me. I needed constant relief without having to drive across town every other day to sit for an hour while a guy spread cortisone crème and some kind of electrons in my arm. This was the alternative to a cortisone shot, which I’m told would have worked better but I cannot tolerate the side effects of cortisone. It was about that time we heard on the news a lot of cortisone was contaminated in a compound pharmaceutical’s office. No thank you very much. By age 56, I was in so much pain from early life accidents, later life running, Crestor, and a myriad of other issues and pain meds was my only alternatives. The majority of pain medicines I cannot take because of the side effects and the others don’t work (at least not after about 5-10 days). There are no pain management clinics in my town but if there were, I know they’d put me on some Fenatyl morphine patch. Again, no thank you very much. So I started looking at naturopathic treatment, more precisely medicinal herbs and plants. I knew from experience (I owned a health food store in the late 70s) that most of them are hype and don’t even come close to doing what the testimonials (and sometimes even scientific research claims they do). However, I also knew that the few that do work as described, don’t have the lethal and near-lethal side effects that are so horrible, the television commercials for these drugs have to play happy music backgrounds in hopes viewers won’t notice. I tried skullcap, an organic legal bud (that youth use for partying) but both clouded my head and neither were any better than aspirin at relieving the pain. I finally came across one of which I’d heard, called kratom. Not only were the testimonials there, but so was the science. It is nothing more than an organic leaf of a tree that grows in southeast Asia similarly to the abundancy that pines do in the south. Though Thailand and Malaysia where it is particularly abundant outlawed it in the mid-20th century, they only did so because it was dipping into their opium trade dollars (opium trade was legal there then). But even then the laws were rarely if ever enforced and there’s not one town or village in Malaysia that does not have at least one “Kratom Shop” very similar to our Starbucks. Ironically kratom is a 1st cousin of coffee but a lot healthier. If one can get past all the “fear articles” on the Internet about it, they will find that it lowers blood pressure, boosts the immune system, strengthens the heart and much more. It can be habit-forming but it is not kratom that is very habit forming (about like stopping coffee as far as withdrawals go). When vendors make a much stronger version called “kratom extract”, they really are not selling kratom but it becomes more like a drug about 15 times stronger than regular kratom. I do not touch the extracts and have had zero problems with the pure organic leaf. More importantly its analgesic effects are every bit as strong as the strongest oxy drugs, without the clouded head, side effects, addiction, etc. Why in the world would anyone take pain drugs today, when kratom is legal (everywhere in the U.S. but Indiana) and not only safer but healthy for the immune system? Sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes, doctors are wrong. It is not that they are trying to do harmful things to their patients; they, too, know they risks when they prescribe Hydrocodone or or something even more potent and dangerous. It is that they are “educated” for the most part by the drug salesperson, and kratom is not the “best friend of Big Pharma”. You can imagine that it dips into their own coffers given the fact that many people have used it to get off of drugs (such as their opium-based ones). Rick London is a cartoonist, designer, musician and author. He founded Google's #1 ranked offbeat cartoons & funny gifts. He says the most pure kratom is at Kratom K. He likes that they give another 10% off their already low price if you type "Twitter" in the coupon code box at checkout.
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