Good News for Chronic Pain Sufferers
Many forms of chronic pain can be treated successfully through a Mind Body approach.
Chronic pain is a pervasive problem in the United States. It affects many people in their lifetime. If all goes well after an injury, pain subsides quite quickly as the injury heals. Pain is typically treated well by physicians when it is acute and early on in recovery from an injury, but when pain persists beyond a few months, physicians may have not much to offer other than medications, injections, or sometimes more surgeries. Physicians are not given extensive training in treating chronic pain, and are typically not very informed on the latest neuroscience research. Luckily for patients, a tremendous amount has been learned in the past few years about chronic pain that was not known before. There has been an explosion in the neuroscience understanding of chronic pain.
We know that all pain is a danger signal generated by the brain to protect us.
We need pain to help protect us. Scientists have learned that when pain is chronic, this protective function of the brain is staying on even after an injury has healed. No actual harm is present any longer but the brain is still protecting you, signaling to you messages of danger. This is great news in fact! If our brain is creating the signal, our brain can also learn to turn it off! This is true even if someone has had chronic pain for years. Scientists, physicians, and psychotherapists have been busy learning to tame the protective danger signal of the brain and achieving remarkable results.
My role is to help you create the needed conditions to turn off the signal from your brain. Fortunately, we now know the factors we need to turn it off, or significantly reduce it.
Some people read this and think “But wait my pain is REAL!”. We know that all pain is real and I would never insinuate that it is not. We can see that the pain is real through fMRI studies. Chronic pain is real but if it is being generated by the brain, without a structural cause remaining, it can be eliminated or at least reduced with the right strategies. It takes work and know-how. I am happy to help you with that! But first, let’s look watch a video to illustrate more clearly what pain is. Here is a great introductory video by Dr. Howard Schubiner and spine surgeon Dr. Sohrab Gollogly about pain.
I experienced chronic pain for many years and thought I was stuck with it for good. After all, I was told the ongoing pain was something I was going to have to “manage”. Despite these negative predictions, the pain had improved for a while, but then over time, it became worse again and even spread to different areas of my body, which is very common. Finally, after seeing countless practitioners, of numerous disciplines, with very poor results, I learned about the mind-body approach of Dr. John Sarno. Subsequently, I learned how this knowledge was being applied by Harvard psychologist Dr. Ron Siegel. From there I learned of the work of Alan Gordon LCSW through the Pain Psychology Center in Los Angeles who created Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT). The more I learned, the more sense it made and the better I felt. I am very grateful to have found my way to this understanding of mind-body problems, and I am on a mission to help others who want to learn about this approach and find freedom from their chronic pain.