🖐️ Pain Relief at Your Fingertips!

Acupuncture is great at relieving pain of all kinds, and is one of the most common reasons people come to Energy Matters for treatment. However, some of our most helpful treatments aren’t acupuncture - they’re topicals like creams, salves and liniments.

There is a long history of herbal pain relieving liniments in East Asian Medicine, many of them originating with martial arts practitioners. In a modern pharmacy like ours at Energy Matters, we carry a wide range of products, including traditional liniments (most of which now come in spray bottles for easy application), peel and stick patches that hold herbal analgesics against your sore muscle for 10-12 hours, and creams and salves with anti-inflammatory CBD. Here’s some tips on using topicals to ease discomfort and speed your healing!

The same safety advice applies for all topicals: don’t apply them over broken skin or cuts, stop using them if your skin gets irritated, and keep them out of your eyes and mouth.

Liniments: The traditional go-to for Shaolin monks, blends of herbs are steeped in alcohol for months to produce liquid pain relief that can easily be applied with a spray bottle.

• When to use: Liniments are great for acute injuries, including of the joints and tendons. Spray a few times a day on twisted ankles, sore wrists, strained tendons or arthritic knees.

Pain Patches: Peel-and-stick pain patches evolved from poultices and other methods of holding healing herbal combinations on an injured area to let them penetrate deeply. In addition to herbs, patches can contain menthol or camphor, which stop pain by confusing the body’s nerve impulses, or methyl salicylate, a topical analgesic.

• When to use: For chronic or acute pain, including menstrual cramps, patches can stay on your skin for 10-12 hours, which makes them great for an overnight treatment, or stick one on under your clothes for all-day pain relief. Make sure to give your skin a few hours breathing between applications.

Creams and Salves: Combining herbal extracts in a spreadable carrier, pain relieving salves are easy to apply with no drips. We carry a wide variety of salves for pain, with a lot of variation in ingredients, from odorless arnica for bruises, to gentle anti-inflammatory lavender CBD salve for chronic pain, to cayenne and menthol ‘Hot Freeze’ for instant relief.

• When to use: With so many options, your practitioner can give you advice on choosing a salve from our pharmacy, but they are especially great to use for massaging sore muscles, scar tissue, or bruises.

We’re featuring some popular topicals as our February Product of the Month!

Get 15% off CBD Hot Freeze Salve Stick or Spray, infused with high potency, full spectrum CBD (cannabidiol) extract made from organic hemp. Organic herbs and essential oils like arnica, cayenne, peppermint, frankincense and more offer speedy relief with an ‘icy-hot’ feel.

Available in both salve (stick) and liquid (spray) form.