It is an analgesic, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant, meaning it reduces our sensation of pain while it blocks the production of inflammatory mediators, and it protects the body from damage caused by inflammation. Pain is the body’s way of telling us that something is wrong.

It might be due to an injury, exposure to an irritant, wear-and-tear, or a chronic health issue. When we feel pain, our body is sending a signal to the brain that says, Look over here! We don’t like this! Make this stop!. If the pain source is something as simple as a pebble in our shoe, we simply remove the pebble and move on.

However, most sources of pain are internal, so it may not be so easy to fix the problem. Inflammation always comes hand-in-hand with pain. Inflammation is the body’s healthy response to pain because it brings blood flow to the area, which brings nutrients and mediators that repair damage to the site of pain.

In a healthy pain-response cycle, we experience pain, remove the source of that pain, send inflammatory mediators to the site to heal damage, and then we clean up any debris so that the area returns to normal.

However, if we have prolonged or repeated exposure to sources of pain, such as joint degradation in arthritis, hormonal imbalances causing menstrual pain, or stress causing migraines, the pain-response cycle changes. We develop long-standing, chronic inflammation that can itself worsen our feelings of pain.

Basically, it becomes a chicken-and-egg situation between chronic pain and inflammation, so both elements need to be addressed in order to break the cycle of pain.