How Angry Do You Get About Your Chronic Pain Program?
Chronic pain is very different from acute pain, and many health professionals try to blame the patient by suggesting that the pain is the patient's fault because of their thinking styles. Does that make you angry?
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.
Are you like most people who've tried the drugs or even surgery and found that they're right back to square one, or that the side effects are as bad as or worse than the pain?
As so often happens, has your doctor or health practitioner basically given up and begun to tell you that it's your fault that you have the pain, and referred you to a CBT program (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy)? And have they tried spinning you the line about "your thoughts create your pain"?
Sometimes they may even have told you that it's your anger that's creating the pain! What they need to realise is that it's the failure of the programs that has given rise to your righteous anger! But how did it come to this?
Well the truth is that most doctors, and most psychologists, don't actually know the failure rates of the treatments they recommend. In the case of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, recent studies show that the failure rate is almost 100% after 6 months, the same failure rate as placebo. Yet psychologists who are taught CBT are told that it is highly effective!
So you do have a right to be angry, but now is the time to take that anger and use it to get the result that you actually want - reduction or elimination of that chronic pain! There certainly is a proven method with a high success rate, and we want you to use it and then tell your doctor about your success, so that other people who suffer from chronic pain can also be helped.
A BETTER WAY TO APPROACH CHRONIC PAIN
Apart from their failure rates, the big truth that pain specialists don't want to face is that your chronic pain is not "in your head". However it is mostly in your brain, but in sections of the brain that are almost entirely out of any ability for anyone to control. So for anyone to suggest that you try to control that by willpower or self discipline is not only useless, but incredibly cruel.
Your pain specialist may have talked to you about lifestyle issues that affect your pain levels, but we're yet to find a specialist who understands how and why these mechanism affect your pain, or what to do about them.
The big reason why most pain specialists "bomb out" with their treatment is that chronic pain is almost never just about the muscles, or the nerves, or the joints, for example. And it's nothing like acute pain. Brain scans demonstrate that chronic pain behaves very much like emotional pain, and isn't necessarily related to injury.
Once we understand this, we see immediately that a huge number of things can cause or increase chronic pain. Even things that you're not consciously aware of, and you can read more about this shortly.
Without question, for a chronic pain treatment to work, it must identify and resolve the conscious and unconscious triggers that are causing and escalating your pain, and these will certainly not merely comprise your physical symptoms. This will certainly not include doing anything so ridiculous as trying to force yourself to think using different words inside your brain!
A new understanding of chronic pain, proven by brain mapping and clinical research, has shown the way to treatment that works.
HOW CHRONIC PAIN OCCURS
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!
So chronic pain, unlike acute pain, doesn't have a direct correlation with the level of injury. Spine studies are notorious for helping us understand this important fact. For years now we've known that people with no spinal damage can have strong back pain, and people with massive spinal deterioration or damage can have no pain or disability at all! So no-one can guess just by looking!
So although chronic pain can kick off at or near an event which caused us acute pain, chronic pain itself is created by the nervous system. A really good analogy for understanding how the nervous system is behaving in these cases is that of a car alarm that is faulty, going off at the slightest bump.
But luckily for us your nervous system has one particular very big advantage over a car alarm, and that advantage is that your nervous system is capable of learning. We don't need to get a mechanic in to chop wires because we can actually teach your nervous system to stop over-reacting to things like temperature or humidity, stress of any kind, and the full gamut of weird reactions we've seen over the years!
We use the term "pain pattern" to describe what is actually happening when your nervous system creates chronic pain, and we do that because it's a reliable action. You feel a certain way, or a certain event occurs, and "bang", here comes that pain again, or here comes that flaring again. The right name though isn't "pain pattern" - it's "conditioned response"!
The range of conditioned responses that each person has can be very small, or quite large - it's different from one person to another. In any case, it's a simple matter to in most cases to do the digging to discover them, and then to destroy them so they can't hurt you any more. Most of our patients really enjoy "the hunt" and are ecstatic as they eliminate each one!
HOW TO ELIMINATE YOUR CHRONIC PAIN PERMANENTLY
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!
We're doing our best right now to explain to fellow clinicians that conditioned responses can be very easily eliminated if we run interference over them as they try to "run". If we do this properly, without needing the patient to use any willpower at all, the conditioned response quickly fades out, and can't return.
This doesn't mean triggering the pain, of course! We're not interested in anything that does that! What it does mean is getting hold of thoughts and feelings relating to the pain, and focusing very precisely on those at exactly the same time as you might be tapping on your head, or singing a song, or smelling different smells. The trick is to use simple, easy multi-sensory stimulation over the top of your thoughts relating to the pain. You can learn to do this very easily for yourself, and we call the program BMSA, or Brief, Multi-Sensory Activation.
WHAT YOU SHOULD EXPECT FROM YOUR BMSA CHRONIC PAIN PROGRAM
One of the best things about this chronic pain treatment is that if you're going to be one of the 80-90% of people who'll get results, you'll know from the immediate start, because most people notice some kind of improvement right away.
And what about the end result? Well 50% of people have completely wiped out their chronic pain, permanently. (This is an astounding figure when you consider that other programs regard 30% who only REDUCE their pain to be a great result!) The remainder reduce their pain by more than 50%, and a small number get no result at all. So far the failure rate (maybe 2%) seems to be due to actual medical factors, such as hip degeneration severe enough to warrant hip replacement.
And unlike what you may have heard from other clinicians, we've never blamed a patient for their pain!
Many people find it tempting to just take their early result as some kind of miracle and go away. We've found that this is a mistake, and it's crucial to complete the program, even if you're experiencing little or no pain. It's only by completing the program that you and we can have confidence that we've got a permanent result for you.
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!
Article Source: http://www.search-raven.com
About the Author
The author is a therapist of over 30 years' experience and a specialist in chronic pain treatment. Ms Sutherland is also the author of the manual The Pain Train, which describes the BMSA Chronic Pain Program
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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