by Christine Sutherland
How angry do you get when your health professional tells you that your chronic pain is “in your head”, or that it’s your fault for “creating the pain” with your thoughts?
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!
You may be getting angrier as you read this, and that’s your right, but anger is only useful if it leads to action, and in this case is only useful if it leads you to do something about your chronic pain that gives you the reduction or elimination of the pain that you so wish for. So use your anger to galavanise you into learning a simple self-treatment process that has a very high rate of success, and tell everyone about it, including your doctors, so that we can get it to more of the people who need it the most.
A NEW WAY TO DEAL WITH 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.
Other facts that your health professionals will freely admit to, but almost never include in their therapy, involve lifestyle factors that contribute to pain.
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.
This is why any chronic pain treatment must support the whole person, not just the “lump of meat” that feels the pain!
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
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!
Chronic pain isn’t caused by actual physical damage – it is caused by the nervous system. To put this very simply, the nervous system becomes over sensitised much like a car alarm that goes off just because of a little breeze.
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!
HOW CHRONIC PAIN CAN BE KNOCKED OUT FOREVER
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!
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.
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 CHRONIC PAIN PATIENTS SHOULD EXPECT FROM THEIR 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.
Overall, around 50% of people are able to totally eliminate their chronic pain. A further 25% of people reduce their pain by at least 50%, allowing them to cut back their medication and at the same time freeing them to be more active. A small number of people (perhaps 2%) get no result whatsoever and to date we’ve been able to explain that this is due to surgical considerations (eg hip replacement required).
And unlike what you may have heard from other clinicians, we’ve never blamed a patient for their pain!
For some people the program seems like a miracle, but we’d urge you to complete the whole program anyway. It’s very important to track progress over time and analyse those records. The usual experience is that the patient does still get some pain, and they do still get some flaring, and both can vary in intensity and duration. But the clear trend will be that your chart shows a decrease in pain, a decrease in flaring, a decrease in intensity, decrease in medication, and increase in activity which you can do with ease.
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!
About the Author:
The author is a clinician of over 30 years’ experience and a specialist in
chronic pain treatment. Ms Sutherland is also the author of the manual The Pain Train – Beyond the TENS Machine, which describes the BMSA
Chronic Pain Program