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You Have A Right To Be Angry About Your Chronic Pain
Chronic pain is very different from acute pain, and many health professionals try to blame the patient by suggesting that the pain is the patient's fault because of their thinking styles. Does that make you angry?
Chronic pain is very different from acute pain, and many health professionals try to blame the patient by suggesting that the pain is the patient’s fault because of their thinking styles. Does that make you angry?
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.
Do you feel an affinity with others like you who have tried out various drugs or exercise programs, or even had surgery to cut nerve branches, and yet still struggle with 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?
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!
Well the truth is that most doctors, and most psychologists, don’t actually know the failure rates of the treatments they recommend. In the case of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, recent studies show that the failure rate is almost 100% after 6 months, the same failure rate as placebo. Yet psychologists who are taught CBT are told that it is highly effective!
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 at the moment we can’t blame your specialists for being unaware of the failure rates of their methods, because they’re being mislead or even lied to by promoters of these methods. There are millions of dollars invested in drug development and training programs, and this is at huge risk when the truth gets out. But that’s no excuse for your specialist to say that willpower is the answer to your pain. That’s plain stupid.
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.
What this means is that a vast number of things impact on your pain, many of them outside your conscious awareness. These could be worries that you have, feelings of vulnerability, relationship or financial problems, work problems, and even diet, activity, support or privacy issues. (Read why below!)
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!
Chronic pain is different from acute pain because it is not related to actual injury. If you were to look at a series of x-rays of people’s spinal columns, and try to guess which people had the most pain based on the evidence of damage, you’d be wrong, because there is no match.
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!
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”!
The range of conditioned responses that each person has can be very small, or quite large - it’s different from one person to another. In any case, it’s a simple matter to in most cases to do the digging to discover them, and then to destroy them so they can’t hurt you any more. Most of our patients really enjoy “the hunt” and are ecstatic as they eliminate each one!
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 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.
But of course we’re not suggesting that we need to actually trigger the pain in order to eliminate it! That’s totally unnecessary! Rather, we ask the patient to focus on each thought or feeling pattern that’s become hooked into the chronic pain, and we teach the patient to run interference patterns over that. The process is called BMSA (Brief, Multi-Sensory Activation) and it permanently “deletes” the pain pattern.
WHAT YOU SHOULD EXPECT FROM YOUR BMSA CHRONIC PAIN PROGRAM
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.
You’ll be pleased to note that we’ve never had to resort to blaming a client for failure!
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.
We are committed to achieving an end result which delivers complete resolution or solid decrease in your pain, with no or little medication required, and which includes getting your life back!