You Have A Right To Be Angry About Your Chronic Pain
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 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.
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?
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?
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 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.
Your pain specialist may have talked to you about lifestyle issues that affect your pain levels, but we’re yet to find a specialist who understands how and why these mechanism affect your pain, or what to do about them.
It’s so important to understand that chronic pain and acute pain are very different creatures. Acute pain is short-term pain that accurately reflects damage, a wound or injury. Chronic pain is generated irrespective of injury, and brain mapping proves in fact that chronic pain is generated in just the same way as we generate negative emotions like anger, grief, or fearfulness.
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.
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?
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
Most chronic pain (but not all) sets in after an injury of some kind. At first there is acute pain which warns us that something is actually wrong and we need to take action and promote healing. The majority of people simply recover and have no further problem. But in the case of chronic pain, the pain hangs around, even though there may be no sign whatsoever of the original injury. This is incredibly distressing to the sufferer, especially if he or she is battling an ignorant or nasty workers’ compensation investigator!
Did you know that it’s impossible to guess whether someone has back pain just from looking at x-rays of their spines? That’s a well-known fact, and just one of the things that helped us to understand how very different chronic pain is to acute pain!
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.
The difference is that your nervous system, although it certainly does have electrical components, is “smart” (meaning it can learn things) and more complex (so that more things are involved in it going wrong). Your nervous system can “go off” for just about any reason at all, and it will be different for everyone because it’s YOUR nervous system.
We call this type of “going off” a “pain pattern”, and this is a learned, conditioned response of your nervous system. Whilst there’s a little evidence that this type of behaviour of your nervous system could be inherited genetically, really at this stage we suspect it’s bad luck, like catching a cold, except of course far more serious and far more traumatic!
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!
HOW TO ELIMINATE YOUR CHRONIC PAIN PERMANENTLY
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.
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.
The final outcome for the program is complete elimination of chronic pain for around 50% of people. The remainder cut their pain levels by more than 50%, so they can easily reduce their pain medication, and can get back to having a more normal life. There are only a very few people who don’t get any permanent result, and so far we’ve seen this is because they’ve actually needed surgical intervention such as a hip replacement.
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 is complete elimination or excellent reduction of pain, with elimination or reduction of medication, and return to work or family life.