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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 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? 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? If you're not already angry, then you should be, because who would choose pain!? How could these medical professionals get it so wrong, wasting your time and your money on treatments that have proven to fail for the majority of people? 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 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. Has your pain specialist talked to you about lifestyle factors that influence pain levels? It's true that some specialists have a surface understanding of these, but we've never found one that knew how to effectively help patients with these important factors. 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 Usually chronic pain doesn't just come "out of the blue". It arises after an initial injury of some kind or another. In those cases we first experience acute pain and that's a good thing because it warns us that something is wrong, helps us to take action to recover, and even helps to tell us what movements we shouldn't do so that the injured area can heal fastest. However in the case of chronic pain even though the injury heals, the pain persists and even becomes worse. And the signals we get to abstain from activity are not serving any useful purpose! 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! 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"! Some people with chronic pain just have one or a few conditioned responses that we need to identify and desensitive in order to teach the nervous system to behave normally. Others have quite a complex array of conditioned responses and of course that can take more time to deal with them. But you'll be surprised how easy, and even what fun it can be, to uncover these patterns and permanently disrupt them so they can't cause you pain any more! 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!) We now know that conditioned responses are very vulnerable to breakdown. It's not like the fear response you'd get if a stanger jumped out at you from a dark alley. That's not a conditioned response, but a survival response! Conditioned responses are vulnerable because if they are interfered with as they try to "run", they rapidly deteriorate and disappear. 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. 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 is complete elimination or excellent reduction of pain, with elimination or reduction of medication, and return to work or family life.
Article Source: http://www.fubrus.com
Christine Sutherland is a clinician of over 3 decade's 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
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