The #1 BEST Pain Reliever: Palmitoylethanolamide (PEA)

Dr. Stengler: Are you looking for natural pain relief with natural products that have good scientific evidence and safety? In this video, I'm going to educate you on PEA. In my opinion, this is the best natural pain reliever on the market, with phenomenal research, and one that I've seen help many of my patients with great results. I'm Dr. Mark Stengler, a naturopathic medical doctor. I've been in private practice for over 30 years and I've written 20 books on integrative medicine and nutritional therapies.

Palmitoylethanolamide is PEA — that's the long name for it — and it's a naturally occurring fatty acid derivative made in the body and found in foods. It was first identified in 1957 and extracted from soy lecithin, egg yolk, and peanut meal, and it has many studies done on it for the treatment of pain and inflammation. In one research journal, it states that PEA's actions have multiple molecular targets while modulating multiple inflammatory mediators, providing therapeutic benefits and many applications including immunity, brain health, allergy, pain modulation, joint health, sleep, and recovery. In this video, I'm going to focus on pain in the body, like the muscles and joints.

PEA has a broad-spectrum analgesic effect, so it relieves pain. It's been shown to be a great anti-inflammatory, and what's also interesting is it's shown to protect the nerves, or be neuroprotective. I was very impressed by a study in the journal Nutrients in 2023 — a systematic review and meta-analysis of 11 double-blind randomized controlled trials, which are very high quality, so you can have high confidence in them. In these studies, patients had various types of pain — gynecological, neurological, musculoskeletal, even irritable bowel syndrome — and nine out of 11 studies reported significant pain-relieving effects. The dosages of PEA ranged between 300 milligrams and 1,200 milligrams daily.

Another study published in the Journal of Nutrition and Food Sciences in 2021 was a randomized double-blind study comparing 350 mg of a highly absorbable PEA known as Levagen to placebo for reducing adult joint pain. In this study, 35 people received the PEA and 39 received a placebo, and the pain scores were significantly reduced in those receiving the PEA. Another study published in the journal Inflammopharmacology, a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study in adults with mild to moderate knee arthritis, involved 111 people receiving highly absorbable PEA in doses of 300 mg, 600 milligrams, or a placebo each day, and found significant pain and anxiety improvements in the PEA group. A study in the journal Pain Research examined eight clinical trials involving 1,366 patients and found PEA was a safe and effective treatment for sciatic pain, which can be hard to treat, as well as low back pain and carpal tunnel syndrome.

How about the safety of PEA? There have been numerous clinical trials demonstrating, in over 1,500 people, that there are no adverse effects with PEA, with doses ranging between 300 and 1,200 milligrams per day. It's been extensively studied in both healthy and sick populations. Patients ask me, can PEA be combined with pain medications? In many cases, yes — of course, you need to check with your prescribing doctor first. Research found that a combination of PEA with analgesics such as tramadol, pregabalin, gabapentin, and duloxetine never led to any adverse effects or interactions. To date, no drug-drug interactions have been documented with PEA. That doesn't mean they'll never find any, but to this point, they have not. PEA can also be used just by itself — it has a powerful pain-relieving and anti-inflammatory effect, so you don't necessarily have to use it with medications.

Patients ask me, does PEA work like CBD or cannabinoids? No, not really. It does indirectly activate cannabinoid receptors one and two, CB1 and CB2, through inhibiting the degradation of the endocannabinoids, and it also increases receptor levels of CB2, so it has an indirect effect. What I like to do with patients is use PEA in higher doses by itself, but even better, I like to combine it with a highly absorbable turmeric extract, which has very good studies for its anti-pain and anti-inflammatory effects, so the combination of the two together is what I generally use. For more information on PEA and turmeric, you can go to my website, drstengler.com. I hope you liked this video. Subscribe to my channel — I have many videos on many different subjects for integrative medicine — and I look forward to speaking to you soon.

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