activelifescientific.org/ This video will help you learn how to overcome chronic back, shoulder, and arthritis pain as well as fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome (CRP) and other types of pain that persist for 3 months or more. Learning the difference between chronic pain vs. acute pain is crucial. For example, opioids are helpful for acute pain, but dangerous for chronic pain, Effective techniques for chronic pain relief are totally different from effective techniques for acute pain relief.
Physicists love to build models to help them understand things. This video presents a model that can help you learn the difference between chronic pain and acute pain and learn how to overcome chronic pain.
Normal Activities: the model first shows that during normal activities the sensors in our body send small signals. These small signals will not result in pain.
Acute Pain: during harmful activities the sensors in our body send large signals. These large signals travel up the spinal cord to the brain. The brain generates the experience of pain by activating pain areas as revealed by fMRI, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. The brain generates the experience of acute pain to help you: to alert you to danger and protect you from overuse.
Chronic pain: if, however, the brain continues to generate the experience of pain for 3 months or more, the brain gets good at it: just like learning to ride a bike. A common saying among neuroscientist is: neurons that fire together, wire together. This means that as neurons fire together in producing the experience of pain, they strengthen their connections and can do a better and better job of producing the experience of pain. Repetition of a task like riding a bike or learning vocabulary makes that task easier for the brain. Unfortunately the same is true for producing the experience of pain.
The result is that the brain becomes more sensitive to signals from the body. Pain specialists refer to this as sensitization. With increased sensitization just doing normal activities can cause intense pain because sensitization is like a volume control for pain. The problem is not the normal activities. The problem is sensitization.
This is chronic pain, defined as pain that lasts 3 months or more. Chronic pain is sometimes called central neuropathy or central neuropathic pain to distinguish it from nociceptive pain arising from the stimulation of nerve cells as in acute pain.
You can take pills or injections of opioids, but the pain comes back - eventually worse. If you keep taking them, the opioids can further increase sensitization further increasing the intensity of the chronic pain.
After months or years of chronic pain, you might be tempted to still keep trying therapies for your body because that is where you continue to feel the pain. But there is nothing you can do with the body to make the pain go away because the pain is there even for no signal from the body! The problem is not the body. The problem is sensitization.
For example, the pain started in your lower back and you continue to feel it in your lower back a year later so it is natural to assume that the problem, like the pain, is the same. Unfortunately, however, the problem is not the same. The problem started with the lower back, but became a brain problem over time because of sensitization. Curing a brain problem by working on the body can only work indirectly through the placebo effect, which is strongest for surgery, then injections, and then prescription drugs with strong side effects. Fortunately there are techniques to work directly on the brain problem of sensitization.
Four techniques for reducing sensitization, from among the many you can find at activelifescientific.org/, are: 1. Learning. Continue learning with books, RU-vid videos, documents, websites and, if necessary, psychotherapy. 2. Activity. Gradually resume all normal activities. Qi Gong and Tai Chi can help. 3. Biofeedback. Learn to warm you hands with your mind and do it 3 times per day. 4. Guided Imagery and Meditation. Visualize the pain areas in the brain shrinking every time you feel pain.
These techniques work best in combination: a Multimodal approach, as it is called by pain experts. There is lots of scientific evidence for the benefits of a Multimodal approach, which is the approach of world-class chronic pain groups such as the one at Stanford University. Once you have dealt with your chronic pain, then getting off opioids can be more easily done by gradually lowering the dose.
These videos and some more recent ones are on the RU-vid Chronic Pain Science channel: / @chronicpainscience
2 май 2017
