The topic at hand is topicals, an underutilized medicinal application. We as a culture suffer from an oral fixation as if the only real form of medicine is swallowed. I suffered from the same biases that is until I worked with a patient who was able to stave off acute asthmatic breathing applying medicine to her skin.
The skin is an organ, the largest organ in fact in the body, and can thus communicate a medicinal action just as much as the digestive tract. The signaling pathway are actually inverses, targeting unique domains of our being. You can think of our GI tract as our internal skin signaling to the rest of our body from the inside our, while our external skin signals to the rest of our body from the outside in.
We can understand the domains of each of these skins better by returning to embryology. We forms three tissues layers – endo, mesoderm, and ectoderm- during the 2nd and 3rd week of development. The endo (inside) tissue eventually forms our inner organs and digestive tract. The mesoderm (middle) forms our blood, muscle, and intermediate connective tissue. The ecto (outside) forms our skin, brain, and nervous system.
So when we apply topicals, we are engaging the nervous system. This is why the topicals are useful for nervous conditions such as insomnia, anxiety, cramping, asthma, amongst others. You can more specifically direct the therapy by applying the topical over the affected organ.
One useful home remedy for any cramping whether it is menstrual, breathing, or muscle spasm related is to apply a small amount of icy-hot over your low back kidney area. This can loosen the kidneys grip helping your body to let go. This was the acute therapy I recommended (in addition to any rescue inhalers) to the patient suffering asthmatic breathing.