A Tendinitis Cure?

A few years ago, we were in daily pain. We loved to play basketball, but our knee did not. Patellar tendinitis, aka "Jumper's Knee", flared up without fail after playing. The next few days would be filled with grimaces and sometimes a slight limp. When the pain subsided enough, we would play again and the cycle would begin anew. We tried taking OTC anti-inflammatories like Ibuprofen or Aleve, but they would only provide momentary relief. We couldn't just take them all the time because we didn't want to end up like Alonzo Mourning. Even a month's rest (because of ankle sprains) did little to 'quell the beast'; we had been suffering from tendinitis for over a year. A cure came from an unlikely source: binge drinking/eating at a crawfish boil.

A Louisiana crawfish boil involves boiling pounds of crawfish, red potatoes, and corn in a broth chock full of salt and cayenne pepper. Eating each crawfish involves so much work it makes pistachios look like Redi-Whip; breaking open each shell to get the tailmeat slowly tears at your thumbskin. Done properly, so much cayenne pepper is involved that it burns your cuticles and mouth equally, leaving terror-gulps of Abita as your only source of respite. Shockingly, this crawfish boil took place in the North, North Bronx. It was arranged by our friend Christian Aucoin, who leveraged his local contacts to have crates of the live river lobsters airlifted to NYC.

The next day we headed to the gym for our tried and true routine of sweating out our hangover. This was a tip we had originally heard of from Vin Baker. This was also the first time in over a year that our knee was pain free! The only thing we thought that could have contributed to this was all the pepper we ate. We hurriedly ordered bottle after bottle of cayenne pepper pills from Puritan's Pride. We took 3 a day, one with each meal. After breakfast it burned like a 'fire in the belly' for about 20 minutes, with lunch gave no sensation, and for dinner had to be taken well ahead of sleepytime. To put this delicately, before our body adjusted to such high doses it affected our "movements" in predictable ways. But these were all easy trades to make because our knee gradually became pain free all the time.

Why does it work for us? Pepper burns, so why does it appear to have anti-inflammatory effects? This seems counter-intuitive like Ritalin or Homeopathic medicine! We speculate that the burning sensation of pepper makes your own body produce its own anti-inflammatory response, which happens to be more effective than synthetic ones. Then again, a simple Google search brought up this nugget:

All chili peppers, including cayenne, contain capsaicin, which in addition to giving cayenne its characteristic heat, is a potent inhibitor of substance P, a neuropeptide associated with inflammatory processes.

Well, OK then.