Yay! Caffeine is good today! Alas, in tomorrows article, it will be bad again...
So this was a study, but I fail to see signs that it is an actual experiment. It showed an association between caffeine consumption and pain tolerance, which is interesting, but only in altering the consumption and retesting the tolerance would one be able to show a cause and effect.
I agree with this for sure- at least for me, personally. When I had chronic foot pain a few years back, I remember being able to extend my running time by taking an extra caffeinated gel. And, of course, those same gels helped me endure lots and lots of fatigue during my ultra running.
Then, just two weeks ago, I had an ache in my upper back. That can be serious since I need to lift at work. I hadn't had a cup of coffee that day yet. Within minutes of having a strong cup, the pain disappeared! It was a little hard for me to believe and I was actually a little disappointed as I was already making plans to call in.
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This is a really superficial summary.
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Hogwash. All sorts of pain remedies that don't work for people with intense pain are being thrown at us because of the large numbers of people who are not in pain being addicted to opioids. Only a very small percentage of people who are genuinely in pain become addicted to their medications. Now we are the scapegoats being made to suffer because of a bunch of babies who can't face life without drugs. The DEA is too stupid to win their war on drugs on their own, so they are now depending on people in pain to sacrifice all quality of life to help them out.
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Caffeine is well-known to relieve headaches. My mother drank coffee when she took her migraine meds, and I drink it for ordinary headaches. And OTC headache remedies often include caffeine.
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@Irene Fuerst
The reason is that caffeine dilates blood vessels; this helps eliminate the cause of the headache.
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@Darcy
I'm not sure. I believe caffeine constricts blood vessels.
I have Cluster Headaches 4 or 5 times a week. I drink
at least four cups of coffee every morning. Then in the afternoon I get the migraines. One cup in late afternoon.
Coffee does nothing to reduce the terrible pain. Other than my pain PILL, nothing helps reduce pain except Medical Marijuana, and Acupuncture does help stop so many headaches.
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Heavy alcohol consumption also deadens pain. Even more than caffeine.
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@Unconvinced
Just ask Judge and Kavanaugh. But not a great solution. (Yes, I know you were joking).
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@Unconvinced--And it also deadens a lot of other perceptions as well as marriages and other relationships.
This is NOT a good summary of the study. And The dropped comment about a plant based diet should have been excluded,because there was no context provided to explain and no link to anything that would explain it.
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This study does not show anything beyond an association of caffeine intake and pain tolerance. It does not prove that pain tolerance is increased by ingesting more caffeine. It may be so, but it may be that people with higher pain tolerance like the buzz of caffeine and thus take in more caffeine. Or that people with high pain tolerance are less sensitve to the effects of caffeine and thus take in more to get caffeine's pleasant effects.
Association does not mean causation. Stop publishing these type of studies without that qualification.
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Or, since subjects were just recording their usual intake, it shows that pain-sensitive people tend to consume less caffeine, possibly because they're also more sensitive to it. Declaring the caffeine is increasing pain tolerance from that study seems like a reach.
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Yes. The study itself (but sadly not the NYT article) acknowledges this. However, caffeine administered acutely (as opposed to taken through daily diet) has been shown to decrease pain sensitivity, and in both animals and humans a possible mechanism for this has been studied: caffeine is an antagonist for various adenosine receptors, and blocking adenosine receptors with caffeine in different parts of the nervous system decreases pain response. The question seems to be whether dietary caffeine does this in naturalistic (non experimental) settings.
It seems like this is relatively new science and the purpose of of this study was to have better tracking of dietary caffeine (previous surveys looking at diet and caffeine showed different results, and one reason could be because those studies did not ask participants track daily caffeine but rather asked for a self report of estimated intake).
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Interesting. I don’t know about the pain tolerance after drinking coffee or tea but I have been drinking the same since my childhood. I start the day by drinking a small cup of coffee, not America small cup which is in fact a large cup and then drink a small cup of tea in the afternoon. However I feel uneasy if I drink more than two cups of coffee a day and not after drinking more than two cups of tea in a day.
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