Lower Back Pain - The 7 Essential Steps To Recovery
What's the most common form of chronic pain on the planet? Lower back pain! And many people suffer from it for years, with no respite no matter what treatment they try.
If you are one of those people who have suffered from a long time and yet not been helped, it's highly likely that this article, especially the experiment at the end, will prove to be what you're waiting for.
IS YOUR LOWER BACK PAIN ACTUALLY CHRONIC PAIN?
Chronic pain is pain that is experienced over a long time (even years) without any improvement even though you've carefully followed your doctor's treatment advice. Although there may have originally been an injury, or they may even be existing spinal damage or wear, the pain is independent of that.
For example, if you were to look at a bundle of x-rays of people's spines, you couldn't tell from the damage or deterioration just who had pain and who didn't. The fact is that people who have little or no damage can feel a lot of pain, and people with significant damage or deterioration might be completely pain free.
Chronic pain is not actually generated by the body, it is generated in the brain in response to normal signalling, and the proof of this lies in fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, which shows maps of the working brain. Brain maps of chronic pain look just like brain maps of intense emotion. This is very, very different to the brain maps of acute pain!
So this is why, if you've had your back pain for a long time, despite trying many treatments, you are most likely to have chronic pain, and this article is most likely to help you.
ELIMINATE YOUR BACK PAIN IN 7 STEPS
Step 1: Eliminating Stress. If you have chronic pain, your nervous system is behaving a lot like a faulty car alarm that is going off for no good reason. The more stressed you are, the more your pain signalling will behave in this way. If your nerves are jangling, your pain will be worse. So you need to make a decision to deal with the stress in your life, today.
Step 2: Consider how your emotions might play a role in your pain. Without doubt, negative feelings like anger, sadness, hurt, loss, etc, end up producing more pain. Some people think that it's not possible to just switch these off, and certainly it can't be done by willpower or positive thinking. But it can be done with BMSA (which you can read about and try out at the end of this article).
Step 3: Being Sociable. I know it can be difficult to mix with people when you're in pain, but social withdrawal or isolation is not only incredibly damaging to your general health and wellbeing, but it enhances your pain reactions as well. It's necessary to make an effort to mix with people in a way that has nothing to do with your pain, so that you can at least for a short time put your focus somewhere else, and get all the benefits that "social engagement" offers.
Step 4: Get moving. The natural instinct is to stop moving, especially if the movement causes more pain. In acute pain, that makes sense, but it makes no sense at all with chronic pain unless it's leading to increased nerve sensitisation (which is a factor we understand and can easily work with!). Activity is essential to mental and physical health, and no matter what your disability, it's possible to work out a way to increase your activity level.
Step 5: Get an external focus. By having an absorbing interest or hobby, you give your brain an opportunity to take a holiday from total focus on the pain, and the nervous system is helped to switch off those painful signals. It's not that you merely THINK the pain is lessened, it actually IS lessoned when your focus moves off it. This is just another amazing thing about the incredible human brain.
Step 6: Check Co-Dependency. You might be surprised to learn that pain depends on environmental factors, and that if your brain thinks that the pain is useful in your circumstances, it may well try to keep it going! Is your pain serving any useful purpose (no matter how twisted) in your family life? Maybe not, but it's definitely worth checking out!
Step 7: Treat the pain itself - directly. It used to be that there was very little that could be done for true chronic pain - most treatments were ineffective or disappointing. But now we have BMSA (Brief, Multi-Sensory Activation) which clinical trials demonstrate to be successful in nearly 100% of people. Try out BMSA for yourself by following the instructions below!
AN EXPERIMENT WITH BMSA
So you can see how BMSA works, we've designed a little experiment that works for most people. It's a little crazy-looking at first glance, but don't let that fool you. BMSA has been tested in clinical trials and has a very sound scientific theory behind it!
Take a moment to think about your pain, and make up a sentence that exactly describes the pain in your own words. This might be something like:
I have this burning pain in the middle of my lower back but a bit to the left I have this stabbing pain just above my tailbone I have this deep ache near my left hip Etc, etc, etc.
In these examples we've tried to demonstrate that you need to describe the sensation of the pain (the type of pain it is) and also exactly where it is in your body, in our own words. As well as doing this, you'll need to give your pain a pain rating. This is where you decide, out of 10, how strong your pain is. 10 is the worst it could possibly be, and 0 is no pain at all.
The next step is to repeat that statement about a dozen times, and each time you say it you follow it with something silly (or at least something that has an emotional impact very different from the thought of the pain). As you talk out loud, you'll be tapping all over your body (for instance 6 quick taps on your head, 6 quick taps on your chest, 6 quick taps under an arm - wherever you can reach). You might get even better results if you walk around at the same time, especially if you're following imaginary shapes or letters on the floor.
If my sentence were "I have this deep ache near my left hip", I would start this tapping, all the while saying:
"I have this deep ache near my left hip, but butterflies are crunchy."
You need to repeat your sentence (the pain bit at the beginning and whatever sentence ending you decided you use) at least 12 times. Immediately you've done that, still focussed on the pain, start tapping away on your chest, take a very full breath through your nose, and then blow it all out very hard through your mouth.
Take a couple of easy breaths and then think about your pain again. Is it still the same rating? Has the pain moved? Do you notice other pain now, instead of the one you started with? What has happened with that pain?
BMSA is much more than this, of course, but this little exercise is a simple way to experience the fact that it can at least impact on your pain. Because everyone is so different, it's impossible to predict what might happen now, whether you got an obvious effect from this or not. Some people might find their pain continues to decrease. Others will find that it comes back exactly the same or almost exactly the same. If you stick with it (see the book "The Pain Train - Time to Get Off") you're highly likely to get the result that you're after.
Article Source: http://www.search-raven.com
About the Author
Author Christine Sutherland is a researching clinician and specialist in treating back pain. You're welcome to view other articles on back pain on her web site.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, which means you may freely reprint it, in its entirety, provided you include the author's resource box along with LIVE links (without "nofollow" tags).
by: ChristineSutherland
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