Painkillers

Aajonus mentioned aspirin in the context of his childhood, when he suffered from severe pain and his mother was resistant to giving it to him because she understood it caused damage. He described aspirin as causing cementing in the lymphatic system. His mother recognized this and tried to find other medications to substitute, but the alternatives available, including codeine, caused him to vomit. He described this as an endless trial of pharmaceutical management that produced its own suffering alongside the original symptoms.

The broader framing he applied to aspirin and drugs of its class was consistent with his general principle: they poison the body, the body responds by suppressing detoxification symptoms to deal with the new poison, and the person interprets this suppression as the drug working. He used cocaine and speed as extreme examples of the same mechanism, noting that adrenaline floods the system at eight times its normal fight-or-flight amount, and the person feels energy and relief, but the underlying tissue continues to be destroyed and eventually "you pay the piper."

Aajonus addressed Novocaine, Xylocaine, and epinephrine-based dental anesthetics in significant detail, and his position was absolute: he refused all dental anesthetics for himself and recommended others avoid them. His reasoning operated on several levels.

First, he described the pain from dental work without anesthetic as manageable precisely because it is brief. When a drill bit hits a nerve, the pain is sharp but disappears in 30 to 45 seconds. When a bit gets hot from friction, the pain is worse because it produces a blistered burn that can last for days, but this problem is solved not by anesthetic but by keeping the bit cool with water. He had all sixteen of his amalgam fillings removed in 1978 over two four-hour sessions with no Novocaine at all. His method was to touch the dentist on the knee as a signal when the bit got hot, the dentist would then stop, dip the bit in cold water, and resume. He described the experience as involving "a lot of discomfort and tension" but "relatively no pain." He also noted that modern dentistry now uses water jets integrated into the drill, making the procedure even less painful without anesthetic.

Second, he described the specific damage Novocaine and its relatives produce. He said that a single injection of Novocaine can cause mass swelling in the jaw, damage nerves in the surrounding tissue, and produce tooth pain lasting two years. He framed this directly: "Take the ten seconds of pain. It'll be over in minutes. You could have a tooth pain for two years just because you had Novocaine." He described these drugs as toxic to nerves, as hardening the whole mouth, as stopping circulation into the bone, and as causing eventual dental and bone problems including gum problems. He also described the detoxification and abscesses that follow a Novocaine injection as lasting months, and said it was easier for him to endure momentary pain than to deal with "elongated detoxification and symptoms of neurotoxicity from the Inovacaine or Xylocaine."

He drew a direct distinction between momentary pain and pain produced by the drug. When you accept the momentary pain of the procedure without anesthetic, it ends quickly. When you accept the injection, you may have no pain during the procedure but you face a sustained, potentially severe secondary pain experience from the neurotoxic effects of the drug itself, as well as long-term structural damage to nerves and bone.

He also described an incident in which he had to undergo a urological procedure requiring general anesthesia, a tube being passed up the urethra. For that procedure he accepted going under, noting that unlike a dental drill hitting a nerve, where the worst lasts three minutes and you avoid a year and a half of novocaine detoxification, the urological stretching involved a different level of intervention. When he came out of the operating room and regained consciousness, he had his pain formula ready and used it immediately.

Aajonus addressed a specific arthritis treatment circulating on the internet that involved injecting joints with Lidocaine mixed with dextrose (sugar water). He was asked for his assessment and gave a detailed answer published in his newsletter.

He said the therapy was "not a remedy but a destruction of the nerves in the joints and a loss of pain is all that is beneficially experienced." He explained that Lidocaine is an anesthetic that produces numbness and nerve damage, and that when the body cannot remove it, it tries to neutralize the Lidocaine molecules by surrounding them with concentrated minerals. That mineral deposition process hardens nerves and surrounding tissue and often causes permanent mild to severe sensory loss.

He then addressed the sugar component specifically. Because Lidocaine is designed to enter and alter nerve cells, it carries sugar into nerves, and nerve destruction follows. The formula does not carry toxins out of the joints; it introduces additional toxins into them, and the body responds with mineral deposits that harden and damage the tissue further.

He reported seeing several cases from this treatment end in joint replacement, because the pain that was supposed to serve as a signal to change behavior was silenced, the person continued the lifestyle and diet causing the toxicity, and the deterioration advanced without the warning system. Some of those joints dissolved painlessly from continuing toxicity, and the person lost mobility with no further pain warnings. Others eventually re-experienced excruciating pain when the deterioration was so advanced that new and surrounding nerves were affected.

He acknowledged two cases in which people received the Lidocaine and sugar-water treatment, had their constant arthritic pain removed, and then immediately adopted his Primal Diet. Those two people did not experience the destructive consequences he otherwise observed, which he attributed to the diet's ability to support the body's detoxification even under those conditions. But he presented these as exceptions within a framework where the treatment itself remained destructive.

Aajonus described one patient whose situation illustrated the extreme end of pharmaceutical pain management. This man had had surgery in which the esophagus was lengthened, the stomach was rearranged and placed in the shoulder area, and everything in the chest cavity was cleaned out and repositioned. Aajonus said the man must have been on enormous amounts of morphine just to tolerate the pain. When the man went onto the Primal Diet, his depression lifted by approximately 80 percent. However, the pain remained excruciating, and a practical conflict arose: as long as he was on the morphine, he would not eat, and without eating he could not benefit from the diet in ways that might have addressed the pain. He died after about a year and two months on the diet, but Aajonus emphasized that those were a good year and two months with his wife and children that he otherwise would not have had.

This case illustrated Aajonus's position on severe pharmaceutical dependence in terminal or near-terminal situations: not an absolute ideological condemnation in every circumstance, but a recognition that the morphine created its own obstacle to healing by suppressing appetite and therefore preventing the nutritional support the body needed.

Aajonus described being given codeine as a child for pain, and vomiting from it consistently. This was part of the pattern he characterized as an "endless trial" of pharmaceutical management that produced additional suffering rather than relief. The codeine episodes were not described in terms of specific physiological damage but as symptomatic of the broader failure of pharmaceutical pain management to accomplish what it claimed.

Across many contexts, Aajonus articulated a philosophical and practical position about enduring pain rather than suppressing it. He had experienced chronic excruciating pain through most of his youth and young adulthood, and he described having learned that fighting pain made it worse. He used the example of charley horses and muscle cramps: the more you try to work them out or push on them, the worse they get, because the lactic acid is already eating at the muscle. His approach was to let the pain go, to not tense against it, to breathe shallowly and slowly, to cry or scream if necessary but not to resist. He applied this even to heart attacks, saying that every time he had one he breathed very shallowly, slowly, did not tense his arms or any other part of the body, and passed out and then revived.

He described the hospital setting in his youth as an environment of forced pharmaceutical pain management that he actively resisted. He recalled turning to knock a syringe from a nurse's hand when she came to inject him, watching it fly through the air, and feeling it as a moment of genuine agency. The injections, whatever they were, made his pain worse rather than better, and each time a nurse came with the tray he had less capacity to resist. He woke to feel the last fluid of an injection entering his hip and cried that the medicines were making the pain worse and worse.

He eventually concluded, based on that accumulation of experience, that following the advice of doctors and the pharmaceutical industry produced bad outcomes, and that doing the opposite was correct approximately 99 percent of the time.

Aajonus developed what he called the Pain Formula as a direct replacement for pharmaceutical pain management, and he described it as working approximately 95 percent of the time for most kinds of pain, including dental pain and migraines. The formula he presented evolved over time through refinement.

The basic formula from his book "We Want To Live" consisted of 7 to 8 ounces of full-fat raw milk, 2 ounces of fresh bee pollen, and 1 to 2 tablespoons of unheated honey. The instructions were to drink 2 to 4 ounces immediately, refrigerate the remainder, and sip 1 to 2 tablespoons every 20 minutes until the pain was gone, shaking before each sip. He said this formula worked about 85 percent of the time.

The refined formula he presented in later workshops and the 2005 rewrite of the book consisted of 2 raw eggs, 3 to 4 ounces of raw cream (with coconut cream or raw butter as alternatives), 1 teaspoon of lemon or lime juice, and 5 to 6 heaping tablespoons of fresh soft bee pollen, all blended together for 30 to 50 seconds. He raised the effectiveness estimate for this version to approximately 88 to 95 percent of the time.

The critical addition that raised effectiveness by a further 10 to 15 percent was eating raw no-salt-added cheese alongside the formula. He specified eating a piece of cheese approximately 1 inch by 1.5 inches, the thickness of a brick of cheese, with the first 3 ounces of the formula. He recommended Cheddar as working slightly better than others, though Munster and Monterey Jack were also usable. He described this combined approach as the "advanced pain formula."

He said not to go 5 to 6 hours without having another 1 to 2 ounces of the formula when in pain. He described using it for his own serious injuries, including tearing the muscles of his lower back, after which he used hot water bottles to restore circulation and then took the pain formula, and was able to attend a black-tie event 24 hours later, though he had to move slowly and wrapped an Ace bandage around his waist.

For the ear specifically, he described preferring the butter, cheese, and honey version of the pain formula because it was the least liquid and would help remove fluid from the ear rather than add to it. He said he rarely experienced ear pain as long as he used the formula every 5 to 6 hours, but on flights the altitude pressure compounded the water pressure from detoxification and the pain was intense.

He also described a range of simpler pain-reduction combinations that worked less powerfully but were still effective: honey and cheese together, dates and cheese together, butter with dates and cheese, cheese and banana, cheese with butter and banana, butter and banana alone. He described the moisturizing lubrication formula with bee pollen, consumed with cheese, as the single approach that reduced the most pain for the longest duration.

Aajonus consistently prescribed heat rather than suppression as the appropriate physical intervention for pain. He explained the mechanism: heat relaxes tendons, ligaments, muscle fibers, and nerves, allows tissues to expand with swelling rather than being compressed against it, increases circulation to the area, and delivers more nutrients for detoxification and healing. He said that pain comes from pressure being put on things that are not relaxed, and that heat allows everything to relax and expand so nutrients can enter and toxins can exit.

He described his own use of hot baths in extensive detail. After his radiation therapy left him with excruciating back pain 24 hours a day, he lived in a bathtub for much of a year. He could sleep for no more than ten minutes at a time without the bath, waking each time to excruciating pain, but in the bathtub the water made his body buoyant, removing the gravitational pressure from his spine, and alleviated approximately 80 percent of the back pain. He would add Epsom salts or sea salt, and sometimes milk, vinegar, and sea salt together, to increase buoyancy and help discharge pain through the nerves. He described the neurological mechanism as the nerves working differently when submerged, so that the pain signals that would otherwise travel to the brain began discharging out of the body instead.

He noted that within 20 minutes of getting into a hot bath, most of the pain would leave. He eventually blacked out in the bathtub on multiple occasions, but upon waking found his pain gone, and described this as one of the discoveries that eventually led him toward healing.

For acute injuries such as the torn back muscles from stringing a crossbow, he applied hot water bottles to the area rather than ice. He explicitly criticized ice use in injury management, saying it should be used only momentarily to numb pain, and that athletes who use ice routinely end up ending their careers because ice stops the healing process. He said to always apply heat, always increase circulation.

For headaches, he described applying a hot water bottle to the head and lying down for 20 to 30 minutes to allow the fissures in the skull to relax and expand, releasing the pressure on the meninges. He said that 80 to 90 percent of a headache resolves with this approach alone, with the pain formulas completing the remainder.

Aajonus addressed ice briefly but directly in the context of sports injuries and general pain management. He said ice should be used only to numb pain for a minute and nothing more, that athletes who adopt ice therapy routinely decline over time and end their careers earlier, and that the correct approach is always heat. He characterized ice as stopping healing by reducing circulation to the area, which is exactly the opposite of what the body needs when it is trying to repair damage and remove toxins.

Underlying all of Aajonus's specific positions on painkillers was a consistent framework in which pain is "Nature's way of telling us something is wrong," specifically that toxicity has accumulated in an area or system from malnutrition, accident, or contamination. If pain is silenced pharmaceutically, the toxins remain and disease develops further. He said this explicitly in multiple contexts: the objective should be to manage and endure pain until the body finishes its tasks, because otherwise toxins remain in the tissue and disease progresses.

He applied this even in extreme cases. When describing a patient on enormous amounts of morphine who could not eat because of the drug, he was not absolutist about the immorality of the morphine but was clear that it created its own obstacle to healing. When describing his own hospital experience as a young man, he described the injections as making the pain worse rather than better, which fit his framework precisely: the drugs introduced new toxins, the body had to deal with those toxins, and the net experience was more pain rather than less.

He also described the context in which even he accepted going under general anesthesia for the urological procedure, acknowledging a practical threshold. The reason he gave was specific: the alternative was months of detoxification from novocaine versus a single experience under general anesthetic, and for a procedure of that invasiveness, the calculation was different from dental work where momentary pain without anesthetic was genuinely feasible.

He was clear that people should not try to force the body to do something through chemical suppression, that there is always a natural way, and that using supplements or chemicals to stop pain prevents the body from completing the work that the pain was signaling it needed to do.

---