PrepperMed 101: Hot Peppers For Pain Relief

Preppers naturally want to have access to medicines that really work, whether the pharmacy is open or not. Capsaicin topical preparations (such as creams) are available from pharmacies now for pain relief. A prepper can produce a capsaicin preparation with hot peppers and readily available materials. In fact, this prepper just did.

One jalapeno was all it took to make a usable capsaicin preparation… and I can still eat the rest of the pepper.

What’s this got to do with hot peppers?

Capsaicin is the family of chemicals that makes hot peppers hot. That means if a prepper has hot peppers, that prepper has capsaicin. Hot peppers are one of the easier vegetables to grow, too. Or at least that’s true here in the midwest. They also are cake to store as well, since they are dry very well and easily.

Ok, so what’s this hot peppers preparation good for, anyway?

Capsaicin topical applications are used to reduce pain and inflammation that arise near the surface of the body. The most common uses are for arthritis, shingles (herpes outbreaks), diabetic neuralgia, musculoskeletal pain, and psoriasis. 

There’s a chemical called Substance P that’s important in neurons sending pain signals to the brain. The hot pepper chemicals seem to make the neurons run out of Substance P, stopping the pain transmission. (1) 

By the way, it’s also the capsaicin that makes hot peppers taste hot. The chemical does its work by activating a particular ion channel called TRPV-1. Neurons use this channel, but so do the cells that detect temperature. Put some hot pepper in the food and the mouth receptors are tricked into thinking there’s actual heat there.

I recall one unhappy incident when I was about five and playing in the garden after harvest. For some stupid 5-yr old reason I got to rubbing hot peppers all over my tender baby girl skin. Not recommended.

The trick is to get the right dose of hot peppers

Isn’t that always the way of herbal medicines? The hard part is getting the dosing right. This is particularly true of capsaicin application. The stuff hurts if you get too much of it. Is it weird that a pain killer chemical hurts in a different dose? No, not really. Even the most potent pain-killers we have, opioids, can do the same if used wrongly. (2)

In fact, when used at prescription strengths, it’s not uncommon for a topical anesthetic such as lidocaine to be applied before the hot pepper cream. The lidocaine doesn’t penetrate far enough to help joints or muscle pain, but it stops the burn of the capsaicin cream.

Normal topical preparations have between 0.025 and 0.1 % of the capsaicins. That doesn’t help a prepper much, since we start with the hot peppers, not the purified active ingredient. One suggestion (1) that I took to heart in my experiment was to put on just a little bit to test for effect and be ready to wash off with a good oil-removing soap or rub off with an oily rag if it was too much. Water nor vinegar will cut it.

Does this hot pepper stuff really work?

Rarely do I run across a natural remedy so simple yet so widely recognized as effective (3, 4. Yeah, 3 is Wikipedia; but you can check out their references from the links. I did.) Between the widespread agreement among sources and the clearly relevant mechanism, I completely expect it does work. I am not, however, a physician; so don’t take anything here as medical advice.

I did make up a preparation, as described below. While I did test it for capsaicin activity, I couldn’t test it for pain relief. The reason’s pretty straightforward: I haven’t any pain to test it on.

Hot pepper preparations

The commercially available topical capsaicin preparations take many forms. Creams are the most common. There are also skin patches, like bandaids but infused with hot pepper mojo. Oils, lotions, etc. are also available.

I made two varieties in my little test. I tried both alcohol and oil extracts. Why? Capsaicin is lipid soluble, so I went back to my basic organic chemistry. Extraction with alcohols is often a good way to get lipid-soluble compounds out of (recently) living tissues. So is oil extraction. So I tried both.

The hot pepper experiment

When I read about the capsaicin preparations, it sounded so easy! Well … it was.

Most of the hot of the hot pepper is in the ovary material. That’s the white stuff that connects the seeds to the wall of the fruit. Since I’d just picked some hot peppers, I sliced one open, scooped out the ovaries, and scraped the seeds away from it. Seeds don’t have what we need for this job. The rest of the pepper I’ll eat later.

I minced the ovaries from one jalapeno, put them in a glass dish, and added about half a ml (10 drops) of vodka. Mushed it about with a spoon. Applied some to my hand. Waited.

This is the minced up ovary from one pepper. All I had to do was mush it up in a bit of vodka or oil.

Heat sensation developed over the next minute. Not much, but noticeable. It’s the capsaicin that both produces the heat sensation and does the pain-killing, so it appears the extract was successful.

But would it get through the skin better if dissolved in oil? I added perhaps seven drops of vegetable oil and mashed it all around some more. Got some oil on my fingertip and applied to a new patch of skin. Heat again; a little less this time. I left it on for five minutes to be sure it wasn’t going to get more intense (it didn’t) then called it a day.

In summary

I’m going to keep this new use of hot peppers in mind, for sure. I regularly grow and dry such peppers anyway. I also make sure I’ve got plenty of seed for them in my preps. You may have noticed that long-term storage food tends to be quite a bit on the bland side?

Next time I’ll use more hot pepper. I doubt what I had from one small pepper of a moderately hot variety was enough to be effective. But I’ll also apply it very cautiously at first and be ready to wash it right off. I have every reason to suspect that a tincture made by putting hot pepper in vodka would be both effective and shelf-stable for awhile.

If that worked pretty well but didn’t last long enough, I’d change to extracting in oil or petroleum jelly for slower absorption. Standard dosing for the creams is about 4 applications per day. I’ve every reason to believe that using whole dried pepper would also work; although it would take more total material to get the same concentration.

You can read about some other potential prepper solutions for arthritis pain here. 

References

1) Saljoughian, M. Capsaicin: Risks and Benefits. US Pharm. 2009;34(7):HS-17-HS-18. 

2) Fattori V, Hohmann MS, Rossaneis AC, Pinho-Ribeiro FA, Verri WA. Capsaicin: Current Understanding of Its Mechanisms and Therapy of Pain and Other Pre-Clinical and Clinical Uses. Molecules. 2016;21(7):844. Published 2016 Jun 28. doi:10.3390/molecules21070844

3) Capsaicin. Wikipedia. Accessed 10-5-19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsaicin

4) Capsaicin (Topical route). Feb 2019. Mayo Clinic. https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/capsaicin-topical-route/before-using/drg-20062561