Back Pain Management Or Relief - Myths And Realities
Christine Sutherland
WHY YOU STILL HAVE BACK PAIN, DESPITE TREATMENT, AND HOW TO GET THE RESULT YOU WANT
Introduction
The overwhelming share of chronic pain is suffered by people with back pain, and yet treatment typically fails to eliminate or even reduce the level of suffering.
We waste over $12 billion on failed chronic pain programs here in Australia every year, and in the USA it is more than double that. If you add on the lost wages of the sufferer, and the cost in lost productivity to businesses, the costs run into many hundreds of billions of dollars, every year. It's easy to imagine what this does to the health system, but of even more importance is the suffering of chronic pain patients and their families.
The experience of pain is common to almost everyone, but the thought of living in agony from day to day isn't something most of us ever have to face. For those with back pain, or neck pain, every movement, sometimes even breathing, can bring that agony.
It is my hope that the methods described here will replace those currently being used which have little or inadequate effect. Based on our own clinical research, we know that we can achieve almost immediate relief for at least 75 per cent of people with back or neck pain. The majority of those people will achieve total elimination of their pain, even where they have suffered for many years.
Immediate results in our first clinical trial group showed 100 per cent elimination of pain for 4 out of the 8 in the group, more than 50 per cent pain decrease for another 2 of them, and zero change for the remaining 2. At 2 week follow-up the results held. At 2-year follow-up we were able to contact only 4 of the original 8. 2 of those had no chronic pain at all in the intervening time. 1 had minor "niggling" chronic pain, and the other had increased pain, however this could be explained by her chiropractor's high-velocity manipulations of her cervical spine, which she persisted in having even though it clearly and severely worsened her pain after every visit.
If you'd like to read more about the research, more comprehensive information is freely available on the web site.
Reading this report will help you to:
** Appreciate how the myths of chronic pain have led to serious mistakes in treatment programs, even by the most highly-trained health professionals.
** Learn about a scientifically proven method for treating chronic back pain that has been used successfully in Australia for the past decade.
If you do decide you'd like to try the chronic pain program outlined here, it's crucial that you first have a diagnosis of chronic pain from your doctor, so that we can ensure there isn't any treatable underlying medical condition. With accurate diagnosis, we can then be more assured of getting the result you want.
So we stress that you should never self-diagnose, and any pain should be properly investigated by a licensed medical doctor. We also stress the importance of keeping your doctor informed of your progress.
THE THEORY OF PAIN - HOW WE GOT IT WRONG
In times past we used to have beliefs and ideas about pain that in the light of current knowledge seem ignorant or even bizarre. Even now, with the benefit of a more evidence-based approach to the development and provision of interventions for pain, and even though we have made enormous progress in the treatment of acute pain (in most cases), conventional treatments for chronic physical pain still seem woefully inadequate in terms of satisfactory outcomes for patients.
You see, we now know that acute pain and chronic pain are worlds apart in nature, and even use 2 different nerve paths, as I'll shortly explain.
It is only very recently that this was clearly understood and better interventions have begun to be developed. (For a better understanding of the benefits and shortcomings of the variety of current chronic pain treatments, please download the more comprehensive report on the web site.)
The major factor in creating worthless chronic pain programs has been that program developers didn't understand that chronic pain is directly linked to the patient's internal state, which is affected by a whole range of completely non-physical issues.
Read on to see how chronic pain is produced by these non-physical factors, and what you can do about it even though willpower has nothing to do with it!
Almost all therapists have given wrong treatment based on their misunderstanding of the cause of chronic pain, even to the point of creating higher pain levels instead of reducing them.
Another very important mistake that therapists have made is where they've blamed the patient for creating his own pain. They haven't been able to help the patient using the methods they believe should work, and therefore it is now conveniently the patient's fault, and the patient must be taught to think "correctly". This is what CBT does, and is why CBT usually fails.
Yes, thoughts and attitudes (and beliefs) do help create pain. However thoughts, attitudes and beliefs are not under the patient's control, and any therapist who tries to force the patient to change these using sheer willpower or self discipline is inflicting an ignorant and cruel treatment.
A far more humane and effective approach (which is what you will learn about here) is to identify and deal with those emotional factors and permanently resolve them, not to try to make changes through willpower.
We've been fortunate that technology has improved to the point where we've been able to clear up the misunderstanding between acute and chronic pain. Brain imaging shows conclusively that chronic pain and acute pain are entirely different, with maps of chronic pain looking just like maps for sadness, or anger, for example.
To us it's rather incredible that no-one else seems to have identified the relationship to learning theory and memory studies. If only they had, we would get other researchers joining us instead of wasting time on red herrings! If only they would realise that the same brain processes that give rise to conditioned responses and memory also give rise to chronic pain.
But so far in the story of development of pain programs, misunderstanding and lack of informatioin has led to a mass of programs which have as their goal teaching the patient to "cope" with their pain, rather than actually relieving it.
So for people with unrelenting back pain, it should be no wonder why so many different treatments, from strong analgesics, to CBT, to hydrotherapy and even surgery, have failed to deliver.
HOW BACK PAIN SHOULD BE TREATED
There is now a whole easier, far more effective way to help people with chronic pain, which does not blame the patient for his thinking, which does not treat the patient as a body without a brain, and which accurately targets the real cause of your back pain, which is conditioned activity of the brain and nervous system.
In complete contrast to every other program, this chronic pain program has as its aim the complete elimination of your back pain. And it does that by working with the mechanisms which produce your pain signals, switching them off permanently so that they never recur.
We call this treatment method BMSA, or Brief, Multi-Sensory Activation therapy. You don't need any equipment at all, and almost everyone can quickly and easily learn to self treat, with immediate results in most cases. Interestingly, the longer you've suffered and the more chronic pain programs you've tried and failed, the more likely you'll experience succes.
Over the last 6 years when clinical research has been carried out in Australia, we've come to expect that approximately 95 per cent of patients with chronic back pain will achieve total elimination of their back pain, or at least reduce it by more than half.
Further reports and case studies are freely available on the web site.
Christine Sutherland is a clinical researcher and a specialist in unrelenting http://www.back-pain-management-relief.com/ back pain. More detailed info about why current programs often fail, and what you can do about your http://www.back-pain-management-relief.com/ back pain is freely available.
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