As the others mentioned, Helios is great for this. I dealt with a shoulder injury for a while that eventually needed surgery, and I used Helios daily (still do) to help with inflammation. I applied directly to the shoulder which seemed to help even further, but this is just what I felt.
SNS Joint Support XT will also help with your issues as well. If you combined the two you’d still be well under a studied dose of curcumin (I think it was something like 8 friggin grams daily) that showed very promising results. Don’t have a link to the study, but it’s floating around here somewhere.
I agree with your statement about masking injuries though and find that daily vitamins like curcumin, MSM, glucosamine, and chondroitin don’t fall into the bandaid category. They’re compounds that help heal and prevent injuries as opposed to things like Voltaren gel that just mask the pain (although it does reduce inflammation). Just my two cents, but I’d rather avoid long term usage of nsaids, like Voltaren, when these other things seem to be just as effective anti-inflammatories with plenty of research to back up their effectiveness. That said, I did use Voltaren for a while with my injury and it was effective, but I prefer to use these things for short periods of time.
Edit: here’s one of the 8 gram studies.
Curcumin has been demonstrated to be safe in six human trials and has demonstrated anti-inflammatory activity. It may exert its anti-inflammatory activity by inhibition of a number of different molecules that play a role in inflammation.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
You absolutely don’t need that much, but it appears to be safe to dose that high for around 3 months.
