What You Can Start Doing This Week, Whether or Not You Ever Visit Us
Most advice for persistent pain arrives as a list of things to buy. This is not that. Everything below comes from the home therapy and diet sections of Dr. Zodkoy’s chronic pain protocol, and the majority of it costs nothing.
Start with one item, not all of them. A body that has been in a defensive pattern for years responds better to a small change held for a month than to six changes held for a week.
Change what you measure first
This is the single most useful adjustment, and it is free.
Most people track pain intensity on a scale of one to ten. It feels precise and it is genuinely terrible feedback, because the number moves with your mood, your sleep, and what you were doing an hour before you scored it. Two months of honest effort can look like no progress at all.
Track function instead. Function tends to improve before intensity does, so measuring only the number can hide the change that is actually happening.
Pick three things you can count.
- How many blocks you walk before you want to stop.
- How many minutes you can stand at the kitchen counter.
- How many times you woke last night.
- How long you sit in the car before you shift position.
- How many days this week you did the thing you had planned.
Write them down once a week, not daily. Daily scoring makes noise look like signal. Weekly notes let a trend become visible, and if the trend goes the right way while your pain number sits still, that is still real progress worth knowing about.
A simple home rhythm across the week
Dr. Zodkoy’s home therapy section uses a spaced rhythm rather than a daily grind, which is easier to actually sustain.
An Oxylon water soak goes on the second day, for 30 to 45 minutes. Oxylon Gel goes on the third day. If you are also doing sessions at the facility, this fills the gaps between them so the week has continuity instead of two peaks and a flat stretch.
Home laser therapy is part of the protocol as well and is described as extremely useful. The same placement thinking applies at home: work the area of greatest discomfort, and where several areas compete, favor the one closest to the spine and highest on the body.
The 30 to 45 minute soak also happens to be a genuine block of stillness, which serves the nervous system half of Dr. Zodkoy’s framing whether you intend it to or not.
Movement that does not cost you the next day
Exercise is important in this protocol, and the specific forms named are chosen for a reason. Walking, whole body vibration, and swimming are all listed as excellent.
What those three share is low impact and rhythm. None of them ask a sensitized system to absorb repeated shock, and all of them can be scaled down almost infinitely on a bad day.
The practical rule is to find the amount you can repeat tomorrow, and do slightly less than that. If a twenty minute walk means a poor afternoon, walk twelve. Consistency across a month does more here than intensity in a session, and the boom and bust cycle most people fall into keeps the system on alert.
Swimming deserves a mention on its own for anyone in Orange County, where year round access to a pool is realistic. Water removes the load question entirely.
What to take off the plate
The diet portion of the protocol lists specific things to avoid. Each has a reason, and none of them require you to overhaul your life in a weekend.
- Nightshades. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and white potatoes. This one is worth an honest four week experiment, because reactions vary widely from person to person and the only way to know yours is to remove them and watch.
- High salicylic acid foods. A broader category than most people expect, including many dried fruits, some spices, and certain berries and nuts.
- Simple carbohydrates and sugar. The usual suspects, and also the ones hiding in sauces, dressings, and drinks.
- Alcohol. It also degrades sleep quality, which matters twice over given how much of this protocol involves the nervous system.
- Chemicals found in food. Preservatives, artificial colors, and additives. Shorter ingredient lists are the practical shortcut.
Remove one category at a time and keep a note of what changes. If you remove everything at once and feel better, you have learned that something worked without learning what.
What to add
The protocol is specific here. Oily fish, such as wild salmon and sardines, four times a week.
Four times a week is more than most people manage without planning, so plan it. Tinned sardines are cheap, need no cooking, and count. A tin on toast at lunch twice a week gets you halfway there with no effort.
This connects directly to omega-3, the first ingredient Dr. Zodkoy highlights for chronic pain. He describes it as anti-inflammatory, unusual in its ability to improve muscle endurance, and as something that feeds the brain and strengthens the nervous system. Food first is a reasonable place to begin.
The ingredients he highlights, and what they reveal
Beyond omega-3, the ingredients named in this protocol are boswellia, phosphatidylserine, magnolia, lithium, and alpha lipoic acid. Dr. Zodkoy associates them with inflammation, nerve irritation, cortisol and stress resilience, sleep quality, neural signaling, and mitochondrial energy.
Notice what is largely absent from that list: anything whose main job is to mask a pain sensation. His stated position is that chronic pain lives in the mind as much as in the body, and that both must be supported for long term relief. The list reflects it.
Talk to your own healthcare provider before starting any supplement, and check for allergies. Nothing here is a reason to change any medication you take, and that conversation belongs with your prescriber and no one else.
Bring in hands on care, and protect your sleep
The protocol recommends adjunct care with a local applied kinesiologist or chiropractor. Orange County has no shortage of both. This runs alongside everything above rather than replacing it.
Sleep is the quiet lever. Several of the highlighted ingredients point at it, alcohol undermines it, and pain disrupts it, which makes it the place where a small improvement pays out across everything else. Protecting a consistent bedtime is unglamorous and it is probably the highest value habit on this page.
When a narrower protocol fits better
Everything here applies broadly, which is the point of an umbrella approach. Still, some readers will find a sharper match elsewhere on this site.
Burning or numbness in the hands and feet leads toward the neuropathy protocol. Head pain with light and sound sensitivity leads toward migraine. Widespread aching with deep fatigue leads toward fibromyalgia. Symptoms that began in a damp home, or that travel with brain fog and digestive trouble, lead toward yeast and mold. If the skin is involved, that has its own protocol as well.
Where to go from here
If after a few weeks of tracking function you want to know what is happening underneath the symptoms, the sensible next step is talking to someone who works with this every day.
Bring the function notes you have been keeping. Fill out the short chronic pain form and our team at Oxylon Wellness in Costa Mesa will reach out.
Disclaimer:
This article is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Oxylon Wellness does not diagnose, treat, or cure any medical condition, and the protocols described are wellness programs intended to run alongside, not in place of, care from your own physician. Individual experiences vary. Always consult your healthcare provider before beginning any new wellness program, dietary change, or supplement, and check for allergies. Protocols were developed by Dr. Steven Zodkoy, DC, CNS, DACBN, who is Oxylon Wellness’s Clinical Protocol Advisor and Referral Partner and does not practice at Oxylon Wellness.
