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How Angry Do You Get About Your Chronic Pain Program?

By: 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 you suffer from ongoing chronic pain you are a long way from being alone. Chronic pain rates have more than doubled in the last 40 years and we've got to the point now where around 1 in 3 people suffer, over 60% of doctor visits are due to chronic pain severe enough to prevent people from working, and where the cost of failed treatments for chronic pain is estimated at over $10 billion a year in Australia alone.

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?

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?

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?

It's not really your doctors' fault, or the fault of your health professional or therapist, because in most cases these people, although highly knowledgeable and highly experienced, are quite unaware of the failure rates of the treatments they use. For example, CBT is often described as the "gold standard" for treatment of anxiety, depression, and chronic pain. And yet objective assessment of studies show that it has the same failure rate as placebo!

Are you getting angrier? You have a right to be. But rather than use that anger in a way that helps no-one, use it to take action and learn a simple treatment method that has a very high success rate instead! Then go back and tell your doctor what you've achieved!

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.

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.

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.

So this explains why physical treatments are so ineffective, and why treatments using willpower (like CBT) are so cruel and worthless. Quite simply, these treatments don't even begin to touch the causes of chronic pain. Especially when many of those causes you aren't even consciously aware of! (I'll explain more about that soon.)

So now do you see why any chronic pain treatment, if it's to be successful, must actually work with you as a whole person, not just a body that has some physical pain?

When you understand how chronic pain occurs, this will make much better sense to you.

WHERE YOUR CHRONIC PAIN COMES FROM

Chronic pain is very different from acute pain. Acute pain is what we feel immediately we are damaged, or experience an injury of some kind. Acute pain is directly related to the wound or damage. Chronic pain usually arises at or near the acute phase (although it may surface years later) and isn't related to the injury, because it persists even though healing is complete. Chronic pain often makes no sense at all, and this just adds to the suffering of the patient, especially if they're being hounded or harrassed over a workers' compensation action!

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!

When your nervous system "goes off" in this way, we refer to that as a "pain pattern" because it's something that does happen continuously, or over and over again. It's actually a learned action that your nervous system does, and the correct term for it is "conditioned response". We don't know yet why some people develop chronic pain and others don't, except that there are a few clues that DNA could be involved. That's not really important, because genes or not, the cure is just the same, and just as easy.

Most people with chronic pain have a complex range of conditioned responses that need to be identified and desensitised. This means really learning to notice your environment and body feelings, and you'll be surprised how easy and even fun that can be!

A METHOD TO KNOCK OUT CHRONIC PAIN SO THAT IT NEVER RETURNS

Like other health practitioners, we'd been told that it was difficult or impossible to knock out these types of conditioned responses. A lot of people still believe this, despite the massive amount of solid evidence to the contrary! In fact conditioned responses are a breeze to work with, once we understand how!

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.

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

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!

Despite the speed at which the program works, it would be a mistake to regard it as an overnight miracle. Even if you get total elimination of pain immediately, you should nevertheless complete the program and continue tracking pain, flaring and medication rates. Most people find that they do still get some pain, with ups and downs, but that their chart shows a clear improving trend as they continue to make excellent progress.

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.myarticlesdirectory.com

The author is a therapist of over 30 years' experience and a expert in chronic pain treatment. She is also the author of the manual The Pain Train, which describes the BMSA Chronic Pain Program

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