You Have A Right To Be Angry About Your Chronic Pain
Christine Sutherland
Do you get mad when your doctor suggests that your chronic pain isn't improving because your thinking style or personality is actually creating the pain?
If this is you, then you are a member of a very large group of fellow sufferers, with 60% of patients visiting doctors doing so because of chronic pain, most of them unable to function fully at work, and most of them getting little or no relief, despite the time and cost of treatment.
Do you feel an affinity with others like you who have tried out various drugs or exercise programs, or even had surgery to cut nerve branches, and yet still struggle with pain?
Also like millions of others, have you been sent along to a Cognitive Behaviour Therapy program because your pain specialist has given up and told you the pain is in your head?
If you're not already angry, then you should be, because who would choose pain!? How could these medical professionals get it so wrong, wasting your time and your money on treatments that have proven to fail for the majority of people?
In truth it's not really fair to blame your health practitioners, because there is so little quality research to guide them. And there is so much misinformation, and even fraud, which comes out of so-called research. For instance many professionals believe that CBT is the best treatment for a range of disorders including chronic pain, and yet careful analysis of research studies show that it is a waste of time, with no significant benefit.
You may be getting angrier as you read this, and that's your right, but anger is only useful if it leads to action, and in this case is only useful if it leads you to do something about your chronic pain that gives you the reduction or elimination of the pain that you so wish for. So use your anger to galavanise you into learning a simple self-treatment process that has a very high rate of success, and tell everyone about it, including your doctors, so that we can get it to more of the people who need it the most.
A BETTER WAY TO APPROACH CHRONIC PAIN
So your pain specialists don't know that their methods have a high failure rate. Something most of them do know but try to resist, is that you are not deliberately causing your chronic pain. That it might be in your brain, but that it's certainly not under your control! For your doctor to say that you should use willpower to change yourself or to control the pain is incredibly silly, and also brutally nasty.
Has your pain specialist talked to you about lifestyle factors that influence pain levels? It's true that some specialists have a surface understanding of these, but we've never found one that knew how to effectively help patients with these important factors.
You see, chronic pain is almost never merely a physical thing. We can see from brain mapping that chronic pain uses very different nerve paths from acute pain. In fact the brain maps of chronic pain look just like the brain maps of anger, or sadness, or fear.
What this means is that a vast number of things impact on your pain, many of them outside your conscious awareness. These could be worries that you have, feelings of vulnerability, relationship or financial problems, work problems, and even diet, activity, support or privacy issues. (Read why below!)
This is why any chronic pain treatment must support the whole person, not just the "lump of meat" that feels the pain!
When you understand how chronic pain occurs, this will make much better sense to you.
WHERE YOUR CHRONIC PAIN COMES FROM
Most chronic pain (but not all) sets in after an injury of some kind. At first there is acute pain which warns us that something is actually wrong and we need to take action and promote healing. The majority of people simply recover and have no further problem. But in the case of chronic pain, the pain hangs around, even though there may be no sign whatsoever of the original injury. This is incredibly distressing to the sufferer, especially if he or she is battling an ignorant or nasty workers' compensation investigator!
Chronic pain is different from acute pain because it is not related to actual injury. If you were to look at a series of x-rays of people's spinal columns, and try to guess which people had the most pain based on the evidence of damage, you'd be wrong, because there is no match.
Your chronic pain is created by your nervous system itself - not by any damage or injury that may be present. To help our patients understand how this could be, we offer the example of the electrical system that comprises a car alarm. If this system has a fault in it, it can cause the alarm to "go off" for no good reason at all, waking people up for absolutely nothing!
The difference is that your nervous system, although it certainly does have electrical components, is "smart" (meaning it can learn things) and more complex (so that more things are involved in it going wrong). Your nervous system can "go off" for just about any reason at all, and it will be different for everyone because it's YOUR nervous system.
We call this type of "going off" a "pain pattern", and this is a learned, conditioned response of your nervous system. Whilst there's a little evidence that this type of behaviour of your nervous system could be inherited genetically, really at this stage we suspect it's bad luck, like catching a cold, except of course far more serious and far more traumatic!
Some people with chronic pain just have one or a few conditioned responses that we need to identify and desensitive in order to teach the nervous system to behave normally. Others have quite a complex array of conditioned responses and of course that can take more time to deal with them. But you'll be surprised how easy, and even what fun it can be, to uncover these patterns and permanently disrupt them so they can't cause you pain any more!
HOW CHRONIC PAIN CAN BE KNOCKED OUT FOREVER
Many years ago, we, like every other clinician, believed that it wasn't possible to do much, if anything, about these types of conditioned responses. We were taught that the best we could do was to help people to cope with them, and to get the most happiness they could out of life in spite of them. There are an awful lot of doctors and psychologists who still believe this. But conditioned responses are now probably the very easiest thing to deal with in the whole array of problems that affect people!
It turns out that conditioned responses can only survive if they get to replay themselves without interruption or distraction. If we "trigger" a conditioned response at the exact same time that we "trigger" other responses, we easily interrupt the pain pattern and it quickly weakens and disappears, without any effort on your part.
Now when we say we work with the conditioned response, this doesn't mean that we trigger the pain, because that's not necessary. What we're doing is running the thoughts and feelings that are linked with the pain, and interfering with those! It's very simple, and the patient can learn to do this for him/herself so that they have control of the process, which is called BMSA, or Brief, Multi-Sensory Activation Therapy.
THE BMSA CHRONIC PAIN PROGRAM - WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT
The BMSA Chronic Pain Program has a success rate which is very high, around 80-90% of people. You won't need to wait months to know whether it will work for you, because over 50% of people notice improvement immediately. Another 30-40% of people can take a few days to notice a result.
Overall, around 50% of people are able to totally eliminate their chronic pain. A further 25% of people reduce their pain by at least 50%, allowing them to cut back their medication and at the same time freeing them to be more active. A small number of people (perhaps 2%) get no result whatsoever and to date we've been able to explain that this is due to surgical considerations (eg hip replacement required).
We've certainly never blamed a client if the program didn't work for them!
For some people the program seems like a miracle, but we'd urge you to complete the whole program anyway. It's very important to track progress over time and analyse those records. The usual experience is that the patient does still get some pain, and they do still get some flaring, and both can vary in intensity and duration. But the clear trend will be that your chart shows a decrease in pain, a decrease in flaring, a decrease in intensity, decrease in medication, and increase in activity which you can do with ease.
The end result that you want is surely complete elimination of the pain, or a very big decrease in the pain, so that you can get your life back, and leave those days of suffering way behind!
The author is a therapist of over 3 decade's experience and a specialist in http://www.realhelpforchronicpain.com/ chronic pain treatment. Ms Sutherland is also the author of the book The Pain Train - Beyond the TENS Machine, which describes the BMSA http://www.realhelpforchronicpain.com/ Chronic Pain Program
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