>Latvian made healing cream named "Viprosal" is excellent for this it is sold >widely in Europe and is quite inexpensive/it contains snake venom/.

I can give you some feedback on this too, there is a preparation in my place called Reptilase and it seems to do very good to prevent clots under the skin to develop bony lumps (calcification of hematomas) which then become very painful when hurt again.

About conditioning by hitting pads/bags : it is ok, only that it leaves unconditioned the upper part of the shin which has no momentum to hit, most Thais as far as I have seen complement it with hitting a wooden pole with the lower part burried in a heavy sandbag.
Personally (at least amateur level) I favor more heavy shin conditioning (within the limits of not harming oneself of course) whenever a fighter can afford it because in my experience a guy who faced the pain of conditioning and heavy sparring and who doesn't develop large clots when hit is able to win sometimes only by heavy legkicks/blocks. At the last fc lowkick nationals there was a bunch of fighters with very good skills abandoning after first or second match they won because they couldn't take it anymore whilst some only average guys who could take more punishment made it to the finals. But again there are constitutions and constitutions. A guy with small few veins here and there and a tough constitution has no reason to worry much ; a guy who has large veins and a thin skin will likely need to do something if he doesn't wanna win only the first match.

Mr. Holt : there are no banana trees in my place, yet something can be done, which is to get a flexible (I stress, flexible, I mean which bends some few inches when hit close to full-power) no-matter-what-specie tree kinda of some 2 inches thick and wrap around some few layers of thin rice straw matress then kick it, in my humble experience this mimicks the best the impact with a shin and if nothing else it creates the psychological feedback of what one can expect to meet ("no surprises", best way to surprise an opponent ! :) I can argue that actually shin conditioning does much more and it is virtually harmless if done within reasonable limits, but this has been done several times on other topics. Anyhow I HATE this shit, it damn hurts :))) j/k

Regards,
Alex.