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Article By: ChristineSutherland
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Chronic Pain - Do You Get Angry When They Blame You For It?
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 surprised to discover that there are many millions of people just like you, who've tried so hard to follow the doctors instructions, taken the drugs, even tried the surgery, but still have relentless chronic pain?
And as in most cases where the "cure" fails, has your doctor or therapist started telling you that your pain is in your head? Even worse, have you actually tried a course of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy where they told you that indeed the pain is your fault, because you're causing the pain with your thoughts?
Yes, you have every right to be angry. Angry at the medical profession who've failed to deliver pain relief, and angry at the therapists who've blamed you for your pain! The whole situation is so crazy that you wonder how it could possibly be!
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!
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 VERY DIFFERENT APPROACH TO 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.
Other facts that your health professionals will freely admit to, but almost never include in their therapy, involve lifestyle factors that contribute to pain.
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.)
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!
The new theory of chronic pain gives us a much better understanding of what's going on, and at the same time makes the solution seem like common sense.
HOW CHRONIC PAIN OCCURS
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!
Your chronic pain is created by your nervous system itself - not by any damage or injury that may be present. To help our patients understand how this could be, we offer the example of the electrical system that comprises a car alarm. If this system has a fault in it, it can cause the alarm to "go off" for no good reason at all, waking people up for absolutely nothing!
Except that your nervous system is much smarter (because it can and does learn) and more complex than a car alarm. It can go off because you have stress, or because it's a cool day, or because you're wearing prickly fabric, or because you sat down, or because ....... it goes on and on.
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"!
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
It used to be thought that these types of conditioned responses of the nervous system were difficult or even impossible to do anything about. But nowadays we know that conditioned responses are nothing like as tough as we used to think, and in fact are incredibly weak provided we know how to work with them. (And telling you to change your thinking is NOT the way!)
It turns out that conditioned responses can only survive if they get to replay themselves without interruption or distraction. If we "trigger" a conditioned response at the exact same time that we "trigger" other responses, we easily interrupt the pain pattern and it quickly weakens and disappears, without any effort on your part.
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.
WHAT YOU SHOULD EXPECT FROM YOUR BMSA CHRONIC PAIN PROGRAM
The BMSA Chronic Pain Program has a success rate which is very high, around 80-90% of people. You won't need to wait months to know whether it will work for you, because over 50% of people notice improvement immediately. Another 30-40% of people can take a few days to notice a result.
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.
You'll be pleased to note that we've never had to resort to blaming a client for failure!
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 is complete elimination or excellent reduction of pain, with elimination or reduction of medication, and return to work or family life.
Article Source: ArticleZones.com
About the Author
The author is a clinician of over 30 years' experience and a specialist in chronic pain treatment. She is also the author of the book The Pain Train - Beyond the TENS Machine, which details the BMSA Chronic Pain Program
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