# CARPAL TUNNEL SYNDROME – Possible Remedy And Easy Prevention



## chuckchuckit (Dec 30, 2010)

For anyone developing or having full blown Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS), I thought I would pass along the nutritional solution (no drugs required) we found works for me and my wife. I am not selling anything, just sharing what worked for us. We programmers often like the answer first, and the reasons later. So I’ll cut to the chase with the answer and give the details later to back it up. Here goes:

I had an acidic PH condition (not uncommon) which I have been correcting with more alkaline foods (especially the use of Lemons). An acidic condition I believe will cause excessive inflammation from even a very minor injury. From my research it is the inflammation that can escalate the damage when the injury is then aggravated again and again (clicking away with sore hands). If the PH balance and the resulting inflammation are dealt with, CTS flair ups never need to occur so easily again. And then even more importantly, the body will then be free to start repairing the damage, because it does not have to continue to deal with the results of excessive inflammation. There are also anti-inflammatory foods (such as Mangosteen) even if your PH balance is OK. Both my wife’s spine and nerve damage from a car accident, and my now former severe case of CTS and Gout condition have been helped immensely by this.

Checking your PH is cheap and easy to do (explained below) to see if your body has an acidic condition. Buying alkaline foods and anti inflammatory foods are not expensive. So you likely won’t see any doctor text books (of which many if not most these days are written by the drug companies), or drug companies supporting this solution. Because there is no money in it for such a cheap remedy as simply eating more alkaline foods to correct an acidic condition causing problems like CTS or Gout. Or eating non-drug anti-inflammatory foods.

If anyone wants to believe the Doctors who are trained by the drug companies saying drugs, addictive pain medication and or surgery is the only way, that is of course their choice. Perhaps surgery is necessary for severe conditions. Surgery is also a risk. We sat across the table this past Thanksgiving from a woman who’s right hand is permanently ruined from a botched CTS surgery. So that does happen. But you can also try the food nutritional route and if you find it works for you, then that would say the drug textbook way is not the answer in such a case. More and more people are learning that nutritional answers are a better choice than the drug industry alternatives that make them money, and get you dependent upon their drugs. And then another drug for the side effects from the first drug. And then a third drug for the side effects from those two drugs being used together etc, etc, ka-ching, ka-ching. (Ka-ching, = cash register sound…).

If you do have an acidic condition like I did, changing a PH level towards more alkaline is an easy test to try, to see if this too has been a cause of your CTS symptoms. It sure was in my case. It may only take a few hours to a day or two to notice a difference as I did. And eventually it also dealt with the starting of a Gout condition I had which is also caused by an acidic condition. I only used foods, no drugs.

Even if you do not have full blown CTS or just want to prevent it, checking your PH levels might be a good preventative measure for many other things too. As my researching started to indicate there are many negative situations that seem to be involved with “a low PH level” which means “acidic”. Such as, it is said that “cancer, bacteria and viruses thrive in an acidic environment”. I even found some discussion about some cancers may be cured by becoming more alkaline. That of course is another story.

--Checking your PH level:

The best test I think for checking your body PH level is the urine PH level test. Because this will tell you what your body is trying to get rid of. If you are too alkaline, your urine will be too alkaline (a higher PH number). If your body is too acidic, your urine will be too acidic (a lower PH number). The blood in the body needs a steady PH of around 7.4 and does not tend to vary much from there. In my research as far as I was able to find, the ideal urine PH should be around 6.6 and your saliva PH should be around 7.4 which is the same PH as the blood PH of 7.4. Some people test their saliva PH level, but I think the urine PH test looking for a PH of around 6.6 will better reflect the PH level condition, due to it is showing what the body is getting rid of (the undesired excess). Some may claim slightly different PH numbers are ideal, but this seems in the ballpark. The urine test should be done in the morning before eating or drinking anything, because you can get very drastic swings in PH readings if you have recently eaten or drank something. This is especially true for any saliva PH test.

There is a lot of good stuff on PH levels on the internet, and one can get really technical about the numbers etc, but the idea here is to see if you are acidic or alkaline. If your CTS is being caused by an acidic condition like mine was, I doubt you will be just slightly acidic. I was dangerously acidic. Ideal urine PH is 6.6. Urine PH of 6.2 is considered very acidic, 6.0 is extremely acidic. My morning urine PH level was often below 6.0 which is considered dangerously acidic (sometimes I was even 5.5 to 5.8). So I knew I had a serious acidic PH problem. As in my case, too many diet sodas or too much sugar free gum with Sorbitol will cause a more acidic condition. As does many other things like too much meat without alkaline foods to balance it out. Usually years of this acidic ingesting will take a bit of time to reverse ones’ body PH level towards more consistent alkaline levels. But eating very alkaline foods to kick start things towards alkaline PH’s sometimes can start to reverse a CTS flare up or inflammation problem in a matter of hours, if being acidic is the cause.

There are a lot of different home testing kits out there for checking your PH level. The cheapest one I found that will get the job done, is a simple roll of PH test tape that you can buy at some health food stores. You just tear off a piece of the tape for each test. It is not really tape, it is just a roll of litmus paper that looks like a roll of skinny tape. The PH tape I use is called:

“pHydrion Vivid 5.5 to 8.0”

It costs around $10 and it has colored squares on the container you match to your tape results to get the PH level from your saliva or urine. Instructions come with it.

If you find you are very acidic like I was, there are many things on the internet that talk about the PH levels of most foods. It is possible to become too alkaline which has its own sets of problems, but I found that even when I tried to eat many more alkaline foods, my body PH average did not seem to change very much at first, but changed quite slowly over many weeks and months. As I also tend to still do the acidic things I should not. So…

--“A Lemon Here And A Lemon There. We Have Lemons Everywhere…”

What really seems to give me a quicker short term alkaline result, or to quickly reverse an acidic condition (may take hours to a day or two), is I just eat about a quarter to a half a lemon or more a day. This counter acts my occasional bad acidic habits. Lemons are the most alkaline food I could find. Limes are a close second. I eat that quarter to half a lemon per day without the husk of course. Lemon juice may or may not be strong enough for my condition. Lemons when eaten are very acidic, but once digested become very alkaline. So for a quick alkaline shot to stop a flare up or use as prevention, I’d say that for me: “A half a Lemon a day will keep the CTS away”.

I am sure I would be better off if I just cut out all the “acidic treats” and just ate more alkaline foods. That is easier said than done. So there is never a shortage of Lemons in the fridge. For me after about a year of trying to go more Alkaline, it has become kind of instinctive now as to when I know to cut up an extra Lemon. I do not check my PH as much these days because I usually know when I am getting too acidic anyway. Recently I ate way too much acidic foods with the holidays and a very painful Gout condition started to come back in my foot and knee. Gout is also an acidic condition. So I powered down the lemons for some days and all the pain and swelling was gone after a couple days. I would have been better off just eating some preventative lemon slices with all that meat and sodas.

--Mangosteen for inflammation.

I had CTS inflammation from my bad acidic condition. Not the type of inflammation you can necessarily see with a Gout condition, but perhaps at a more cellular level where the internal swelling occurs around damaged ligaments and tissues that causes the CTS pain. And then can cause even more damage if continued aggravation keeps occurring from more keyboard use. Correcting my PH level would make my CTS pain go away because much of the resulting inflammation would go away once the Acidic PH level is changed to more alkaline. So when my wife’s back trouble from a car accident 10 years ago was starting to cause her more and more trouble due to what her Chiropractor said was inflammation, I thought “well, she must have an acidic PH level like me”. So we tested her PH levels many times and she always came out OK. Meaning she had a normal PH level. So her worsening inflammation problem (that was nearly crippling her at times) was not caused by an acidic condition like mine was. We figured her damaged spine from the car accident was becoming more damaged over time from the inflammation flare ups caused by sometimes just the slightest aggravation to her already damaged neck and back. Like just keyboard typing an extra hour at work could cause her to be in a lot of pain for 2-4 weeks at a time. Her pain is not in her hands, but keyboard typing causes the severe pain in her back that was damaged in the car accident. She almost lost her job a couple years ago when she was literally flat on her back in bed not being able to work for a month while in constant pain. Finally going back to work she could not sit down (which caused pain) so would stand up for the 2 hours a day round trip on public transit to go to work. And then at work had to arrange her desk so she could remain standing while typing because it was too painful to sit down and type. So I knew the only thing that would help her would be to avoid the inflammation somehow. But in her case her inflammation problem was not being caused by an acidic condition. It was just inflammation from the car accident injury. They wanted to put her on pain drugs but she did not want any addicting drugs. She would constantly be taking the maximum of Ibuprofen a non-addicting drug, but that did not help much.

Then by coincidence, thank God, I heard about an anti-inflammatory food a customer of mine was talking about. It is called Mangosteen. It is a food not a drug, that only grows in the hottest tropics, so is a bit rare. The liquid form is very expensive at around $140.00/month, but we found a powdered version that is around $14/month (ten times cheaper) that works great for my wife and me. It has been about 6 months now and each month my wife has gotten better. Since then she has not lost a single day of work from any inflammation flare ups in her back or neck, and is now seeing her Chiropractor only every 6 weeks as a maintenance thing. During past flare ups she used to be in bad shape for weeks and would see the Chiropractor about 3 or 4 times per week before taking Mangosteen. When she first started taking Magosteen she said it was about a week before she started noticing a positive change. My research showed that Mangosteen really only stays in your system for about 4 hours. But what I think it really does is it deals with the excessive inflammation so well in those 4 hours that your body can then use its energies to figure out how to literally start repairing much of the damage done. Perhaps over time even reverse some pretty bad long term damage as has happened for my wife. 100% drug free too. My wife said each week she was noticing less and less pain until one day it was literally all gone. She can still aggravate it from too much work but it recovers usually the same day or by the next day. And the past couple of months she has been working a lot of overtime doing more than usual data entry keyboard stuff. Her condition before taking Magosteen was getting progressively worse with each occurrence of inflammation flare-ups happening more often and being caused by less aggravation than previous episodes. It was becoming chronic and would have been just a matter of time before she lost her job for good.

I started trying Mangosteen too and even at times when my PH levels become much too acidic I do not have as much trouble recovering either in addition to watching my PH levels. I take 2 powdered tablets 500mg each with breakfast, and my wife takes 1 tablet 4 times a day (every 4 hours), because her inflammation problem cannot be dealt with by changing her PH level (because her PH level is already OK). Here is the vitamin company where we buy our inexpensive powdered Mangosteen, That vitamin company says Mangosteen helps with digestion and fights free radicals, but I do not think they are aware of it being an anti-flammatory food:

Swanson Health Products
1-800-437-4148
Mangosteen Triple Standardized
500mg 90 capsules, aprx $14

So that’s it. I am not trying to sell anything, just passing along what helped both my wife and myself. If you have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and you also find you have an acidic PH condition, then there is a good chance becoming more Alkaline will help and perhaps fix the problem for you too. The Mangosteen anti-inflammatory powder capsules sure help too to keep the excessive inflammation down which I believe is the real culprit in doing the more serious damage after the injury is already there. Years ago my CTS was so bad that I had to completely quit coding then because it was extremely painful to try to close either of my hands, etc. I tried all the ergonomic desk things, all the hand and body exercises, which helped some, but it did not halt the worsening condition, until I corrected my acidic PH level and inflammation. It is amazing how the body can then heal itself, once it is freed up to do so.

So if anyone tries this and has success, maybe they could post back here how it went. Or possibly add solutions they have found that work too. Who knows , maybe this can assist the coding community some, where CTS at times can really play havoc with our coding hands.

God Bless and best of coding!

Chuck


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## chuckchuckit (Jan 27, 2011)

Was wondering if anyone who has CTS symptoms gave the PH acidic level test a try?


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