ROHAN CANNON · FOUNDER & FORMULATOR
Rohan’s story
If you live with pain every day, I get it.
I’ve lived with severe pain from back injuries and testicular nerve damage most of my life. I know what it’s like when pain starts controlling your sleep, your work, your movement — and how much of your life you get to live.
2016Hospital 
After recoveryDevices removed 
TodayIn the lab
Years of pain
A life shaped by pain.
For years, my life revolved around surgeries, appointments, medications and trying to find something that would give me more of my life back. I had an implanted morphine pump and a spinal cord stimulator. Even with increasingly intensive treatment, pain kept narrowing what I could do.
By 2016, after years of surgeries, medications and increasingly intensive pain treatment, I was desperately ill in hospital. Lying there surrounded by tubes and machines, I dreamed of getting my health back — of climbing mountains, swimming in tropical seas and actually living again.
A change in approach
Looking for another way forward.
The hospital photograph captures how ill I had become. The change in how I approached recovery came during a later, prolonged ketamine infusion, while my pain was still uncontrolled.
I began questioning what I thought I knew about health and researching safer, more natural options. As I rebuilt my health, that research became an obsession.
I broadened the search into nutrition, magnesium, plant compounds, the microbiome, pain perception. I kept asking what else might help, and what I could learn from it.
Years of rebuilding
Recovery took years.
There were years of research, experimentation, stretching and physical rebuilding. As my health and function improved, I progressively reduced the pain medications I had relied on for so long.
I wanted to walk further, move more freely and do the things I had imagined from a hospital bed. Those changes gave me a reason to keep going, and to keep learning.
2021
At first, it was just for us.
CannonBalm grew out of that research. I had been studying and using concentrated plant ingredients, and wondered whether I could put some of that work into a topical balm.
When my wife was dealing with back pain, I mixed up a first version for her to try. We started using it ourselves, then sharing it with family and friends.
Turning that first mixture into a stable balm took a lot more work. Our house filled with jars, each with a code, as I tested different versions and worked on the formulation.
But everyone I shared it with kept telling me I needed to make it available to other people.
In 2021, CannonBalm became a business because I realised I couldn’t keep it to myself.
Mangosteen 
Pomegranate 
Clove 
Peppermint 
Magnesium
2023 · Hamilton Island
I was living the life I’d once dreamed about from a hospital bed.
2023
The life I’d dreamed about.
In August 2023, I stood on a mountain above the Whitsundays at sunrise and watched a humpback whale and her calf breach below me.
I thought about the hospital room, the research, the medication reductions and the years of rebuilding. Standing there, I finally recognised how far I had come.
After recovery
The final safety net.
By then, the active medication in my implanted morphine pump had been replaced with saline. The pump was still inside me as a safety net, but it was no longer delivering pain medication. I was no longer using the spinal cord stimulator either.
The day after that climb, my pain specialist and I decided to arrange the removal of both devices. Their later surgical removal marked the end of that recovery journey.
Today
From pain clinics to my own lab.
In 2016, my life revolved around hospitals and pain clinics. I never imagined I’d one day be in my own lab helping other people living with pain.
Today, my mission is to help other people living with pain — and few things mean more to me than hearing that CannonBalm has helped someone get more of their life back.
