Mind Control For Pain

Today's article from psychologytoday.com (see link below) looks at the potential for a 'mind-over-matter' solution for chronic pain. It's sensibly and realistically written and once again, some people may gain significant relief by following up some of the suggestions. Others may react with a hollow laugh because their pain is so much bigger than any of the mind tools shown here. Sometimes, it's a question of 'matter-over-mind'.

Mind Control: Coping with Chronic Pain

I can see for miles.

Published on April 30, 2011 by Dr. Mark Borigini, M.D. in Overcoming Pain

We are told this: The mind is able to control the body. For the chronic pain patient who may have seemingly exhausted treatment options, this notion of mind over matter takes on a hopeful urgency.
When there is some sort of injury or insult causing pain, the signal conveying pain travels to the brain via a sensory pathway and an emotional pathway. This emotional aspect of the experience of pain travels to the parts of the brain known as the amygdale and the anterior cingulated cortex. The mind-body treatments that involve such activities as meditation and relaxation likely affect these emotional networks.

Researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging to allow chronic pain patients to "visualize" pain. These images allow a patient to actively participate in manipulating what has heretofore been an amorphous concept. The chronic pain patient becomes empowered, whether it be through yoga, biofeedback, or meditation.

Any such coping technique for chronic pain should begin with controlled deep breathing:

1. It is best to be in a relaxed position in a dark room, with eyes closed or focused on a point.

2. Breathe deeply, while continuing to focus.

3. Continue with controlled breathing for a few minutes.

4. If you sense this control of respirations is allowing for a slowing down of breathing, then try a particular imagery technique.

Examples of imagery and chronic pain control techniques include:

1. Focus on a non-painful body part, and see whether this diverts the mind away from focusing on, say, chronic back pain.

2. Mentally separate the painful body part from the remainder of the body; use dissociation to keep the pain away.

3. Divide different sensations of pain into separate parts: If a patient feels burning associated with pain, he or she might find it helpful to focus solely on the burning sensation, and not on the pain by using such sensory splitting.

4. Imagine a numbing injection of some miraculous medicine.

5. "Travel" back in time, when the patient was pain free.

6. Imagine a symbol for one's chronic pain, for example, a loud noise; turn the volume down, and reduce the pain.

7. Use positive imagery to focus on something pleasant.

8. Count silently to divert the mind from the chronic pain.

These tasks seem silly to some; or at best, self-evident. But for some chronic pain patients, they do help. A professional may be needed during the learning process; and it may take practice before these techniques have an impact on the chronic pain patient. Such a patient should work on these pain coping mental exercises at least 30 minutes three times a week.

You know you are good when you can reduce pain and increase relaxation with a few deep breaths. The sense of control that accompanies such mastery in and of itself can be responsible for a significant reduction in chronic pain.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/overcoming-pain/201104/mind-control-coping-chronic-pain

In The Mind Or In The Brain Is Your Nerve Pain Worse Than It Should Be

Today's post from painscience.com (see link below) is really addressed at doctors and other health professionals who are treating patients with chronic pain but it's safe to assume that those patients themselves will gain a tremendous amount of insight into their own problems by reading this article. If any patient knows about misleading pain signals, it's the nerve pain patient and the ideas about central sensitization that this article expounds are directly relevant to neuropathy sufferers. Understanding how your own pain experience works will give you a heads up into how better to deal with it. How do we know if our pain is worse because the pain signals say it is and even perversely promote further pain? We don't is the answer but accepting the very idea, will help us psychologically  create coping strategies. Yep, mind over matter is a cliche but if we can identify when the pain is worse than it should be, then we just may be able to reduce it ourselves without taking yet more pills. You need to read the article to get the gist but don't worry, it's readable and relevant and you won't be bogged down in scientific jargon.

Central Sensitization in Chronic Pain
by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada bio updated November 17 2016 (first published 2011)
 
Pain itself can change how pain works, resulting in more pain with less provocation

Pain itself often modifies the way the central nervous system works, so that a patient actually becomes more sensitive and gets more pain with less provocation. That sensitization is called “central sensitization” because it involves changes in the central nervous system (CNS) in particular — the brain and the spinal cord. Sensitized patients are not only more sensitive to things that should hurt, but also to ordinary touch and pressure as well, which obviously should not hurt. Their pain also “echoes,” fading more slowly than in other people.


This first section is a direct jargon-to-English translation of an important scientific paper by Clifford Woolf, a rock star of a pain researcher, published in Pain in Oct 2010. Everyone needs to know this: it’s owner’s manual stuff. After the translation, I offer some of my own ideas about what it all means for patients and professionals.

In more serious cases, the extreme over-sensitivity is obvious. But in mild cases — which are probably quite common — patients cannot really be sure that pain is actually worse than it “should” be, because there is nothing to compare it to except their own memories of pain.

This rather awful thing is actually quite easy to create in the lab, like a mad scientist’s monster. Any kind of noxious stimuli can trigger the change — anything that hurts skin, muscles or organs — and it can be reliably detected with special equipment. The role of sensitization in several common diseases12 has been proven and well-documented, and may in particular be provoked by (common) muscle pain.3 It can also persist and worsen in the absence without apparent provocation. This rather awful thing is actually quite easy to create in the lab, like a mad scientist’s monster.

Indeed, this neurological meltdown is such a consistent complication of other painful problems that some researchers now believe central sensitization is actually a major common denominator in most difficult pain problems. That is, it may be the nearly universal factor that puts the “chronic” in chronic pain, giving all such problems shared characteristics regardless of how it got started — not the cause of the pain, but perhaps the cause of its chronicity.

The existence of central sensitization is quite well established. What is still unknown is why it happens to some people and not others. Both environment and genetics are probably factors — aren’t they always? — but which genes, and what things in the environment? We just do not know yet.

Another unfortunate gap in our scientific knowledge is that there are no clear criteria for diagnosing central sensitization. There is no easy lab test or checklist that can confirm it.4 It could be present in nearly any difficult case of chronic pain, but it’s not a sure thing — the pain could still be coming from a continuing problem in the tissue, with or without central sensitization muddying the waters.
Hallucinating pain

One easy way to understand central sensitization is that it causes pain hallucinations: a bogus perception, but instead of seeing lizards on the walls, you feel pain that makes no sense.

There are some related conditions that are easier to understand. For instance, hyperacusis is an increased sensitivity to sounds, usually specific frequencies and volumes. Imagine a restaurant that sounds as loud as a rock concert. My father, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, suffered from this condition for a couple years: he was hallucinating loudness. He spend a long time re-calibrating his sense of what “loud” is. A big part of that was asking my mother for an opinion on the loudness, and trusting her judgement: yes, it really is loud in here or no, this really isn’t very loud. By frequently checking his perception against a healthy, objective assessment, he was able to slowly adjust his subjective volume scale.

But pain hallucination is a completely personal and internal experience, and there’s no good way to check the validity of your pain. No one can tell you, no, that really isn’t very painful. They cannot know.5

Pain hallucinations do not mean that pain isn’t real. It usually means it’s just a too loud interpretation of something that would hurt even if you weren’t sensitized. It’s also real in the same sense that hallucinations are caused by real neurological problems. When you feel pain you’re not supposed to, it just means that the nervous system itself is damaged, rather than the tissues it’s supposed to be reporting on. The pain system is borked.





Health care for pain problems remains overwhelmingly preoccupied with structural and biomechanical causes — they exist, but therapists hoping to diagnose pain that way are generally barking up the wrong tree. The last 20 years of pain science strongly suggest that neurology is by far the most important factor in most chronic pain.

Making a bad situation worse: the trouble with not knowing the neurology

Even the clearest localization of pain in one area may, in fact, be originating from a distant area …. The reference of pain implies the existence of convergence of inputs within the spinal cord. This leads to the necessary involvement in central neural circuits in the simplest of peripheral disorders. It also leads to the possibility that the basic disorder is entirely central …


Professor Patrick D. Wall, FRS, DM, FRCP, in the Foreword to Muscle Pain: Understanding its nature, diagnosis and treatment

Pain is a warning system, and central sensitization is therefore a disease of over-sensitivity to threats to the organism — a hyperactive warning system. When physical therapists, massage therapists and chiropractors treat a chronic pain patient too intensely, they are going to trigger that alarm system, and quite possibly make the situation worse instead of better.

Central sensitization is bad news, but worse still is how few health care professionals are aware of the neurology and make things worse with careless or even deliberately rough, no-pain-no-gain treatment. It’s bad enough that ignorance of central sensitization leads to wild goose chases and patients riding a merry-go-round of expensive and ineffective therapies, but many kinds of therapy are also quite painful — and can make the problem worse. With tragic irony, the most likely victims are also the most vulnerable and desperate patients, patients going through the therapy grinder, their hopes leading them right into the hands of the most intense therapists.

The science of central sensitization is not all that new, but its surprising clinical implications are still emerging, and resisted by many health care professionals thinking well inside the box they were taught in. Ignorance of central sensitization leads to wild goose chases and patients riding a merry-go-round of expensive and ineffective therapies. Their minds are firmly made up that pain is mainly “in” tissues, something wounded or irritated inside your meaty, gristly anatomy. Of course, trouble with tissues is important too — but the science has shown us that it is much less dominant a factor than anyone used to think. Countless studies now have shown a surprising, counter-intuitive disconnect between symptoms and problems plainly visible on scans.6 Or, in rheumatoid arthritis, patients often suffer more pain than expected from just the inflammatory erosion of their joints7 — and sensitization is probably the explanation for the “spread” of pain beyond their joints.8 Factors like poor sleep quality may drive up sensitization, and thus are more of a cause of pain than anything going on in the tissues.9

It’s actually quite astonishing how little pain is caused by some seemingly dramatic issues in your tissues! “The evidence that tissue pathology does not explain chronic pain is overwhelming (e.g., in back pain, neck pain, and knee osteoarthritis).” (Moseley)

It all starts to make a lot more sense when you understand how the your pain system works — that pain is strongly regulated by the brain.

Professionals may pay some lip service to the importance of integrating neurological considerations into treatment, but their respect is often more poetic and politically correct than practical.10 Care for chronic pain of all kinds needs to soothe and normalize the nervous system — not challenge it with vigorous manipulations.
What should patients do? (Professionals should read this too!)

Patients with stubborn pain problems should start trying to decide if they are experiencing “too much” pain — more than seems to “make sense.” It’s not an easy question to answer. When we hurt, it always seems like a big deal! Again, it’s just like a patient with hyperacusis trying to figure out if sounds are actually too loud, or just seem that way. Unfortunately, a pain patient cannot ask anyone: “Does that seem really painful to you? Or is that just my central sensitization?”

ZOOM


You’ve got some nerve

Pay attention to this. Not much else matters if this part of you isn’t happy.

If you suspect that your nervous system is no longer giving you useful, sensible pain signals, then be extra cautious about painfully intense therapies and skeptical of biomechanical explanations for your pain (i.e. “you hurt because you have a short leg”) — such factors are only part of the picture, and probably the least important part. Make sure any professional you see is aware of the phenomenon of central sensitization, and start using that as a criteria for judging the quality of their services — if your doctor or therapist doesn’t act like they know what central sensitization is, take your business elsewhere.

You might go through quite a few professionals before finding one who shows some “sensitivity to sensitivity.”

Medications that work on the central nervous system11 are probably the most promising treatment for serious pain system dysfunction. Only a physician trained in the care of chronic pain can prescribe those medications. The best place to look for such a doctor is in a pain clinic — if you have serious chronic pain, you should start looking for one today.

Finally, regardless of whether or not central sensitization is actually happening in your body now, it always makes sense to be kind to your central nervous system. Make your life “safer” and less stressful. Gentler. Easier. Centralization of pain is the process of the central nervous system’s “opinion” of the situation becoming more important than the actual state of the tissues. This is not an “all in the head” problem, but a “strongly affected by the head” problem, like an ulcer that is caused by a very real bug but is severely aggravated by stress.

When your CNS is “freaked out” and over-interpreting every signal from the tissues as more painful than it should, therapy becomes more about soothing yourself and feeling safe than about fixing tissues. Pain is, at a very fundamental level, all about your brain’s assessment of safety: unsafe things hurt. If your brain thinks you’re safe, pain goes down.

So, for the chronic pain sufferer, cultivating “life balance” and peacefulness is a logical foundation for recovery, more important than just a pleasing philosophy — and it’s a worthwhile challenge even if it fails as therapy, of course. This is what I always meant by the idea of “healing by growing up,” long before I had even heard of central sensitization.
What should professionals do? (Patients should read this too!)

At the end of this section, I provide some practical sensitization-friendly treatment principles in point form — but they follow almost automatically from education, which is the main thing. Professionals need to get their bums into gear and simply learn more about central sensitization and pain neurology generally. Once you’ve learned more about sensitization, it’s hard not to do start doing things differently.

Start deconstructing your assumptions about pain with my article on the follies and inconsistencies of structural models of pain, and also read Eyal Lederman’s more academic treatments of the same topic (on low back pain, and core strengthening). Then read Clifford Woolf’s excellent 2010 tutorial, “Central sensitization: Implications for the diagnosis and treatment of pain” — it’s heavy reading, but worth the mental exertion.

There are two websites that consistently produce good, readable, science-based information and resources about central sensitization and related topics: A massage therapist once inflicted extreme discomfort on my armpit because she believed that there were evil “restrictions” in there.Body In Mind and the NOI Group. Also, physical therapist Diane Jacobs is extremely active on Facebook, constantly sharing valuable information on this theme on her page, Neuroscience and Pain Science for Manual Physical Therapists.

Finally: please start treating pain patients like they might have a janky nervous system that is over-reacting to every possible perceived threat — and stop chasing the red herrings of subtle biomechanical problem of dubious clinical relevance, that are mostly nearly impossible to prove or treat anyway, and which often lead you to try to apply to much pressure to tissues. For example, a massage therapist once inflicted extreme discomfort on my armpit because she believed that there were evil “restrictions” in there and that she could rip her way to a cure of a shoulder problem I didn’t even really have. All she accomplished was to swamp my nervous system with nociception, and it could have been disastrous if I’d been a chronic pain patient.

Instead of trying to “fix” anything, seek to create (or at least contribute to) a felt experience of wellness. Make therapy pleasant, easy, and reassuring. Help the patient remember what it’s like to feel safe and good.

This transition can be immensely liberating: it can put an end to the wild goose chases for sources of pain in the tissues in many of your toughest cases.

Fundamentals of Treatment (aka Axioms of Function, by Greg Lehman)

These principles are described in detail in Don't Freak Out by Greg Lehman, BKin, MSc, DC, MScPT. All great points, but the most neglected, important, and relevant to sensitization is obviously 

Rule out red flags
Rule out serious tissue pathology
The body is strong and adaptable
Pain is more about sensitivity than about injury
Treatment is about finding the appropriate stressor
The patient is an active participant in their own care
Decorations (“Useful Though Not Fundamental Axioms”)
Gauge your treatments by assessing sensitivity
Manual therapy is an adjunct to fundamentals
Your assessment reinforces their belief in strength
Comprehensive capacity trumps assessment-driven correctives
Postural and movement assessments reveal habits but not flaws 

https://www.painscience.com/articles/central-sensitization.php

How The US Is Changing Its Mind On Marijuana

Today's interesting post from the Australian abc.net.au (see link below) takes a slightly different look at the progress of marijuana legalisation in the United States. The gradual recognition of the benefits of medical marijuana for a variety of conditions (including neuropathic pain) has led to more and more states legalising the herb thus allowing many more people to take advantage. It's one of the few areas where the USA actually seems to be taking a more liberal stand than most of the rest of the world. Worth a read.

The dope on legalising marijuana in the US
Ben Knight reported this story on Sunday, March 23, 2014
Listen to MP3 of this story ( minutes)

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ELIZABETH JACKSON: This month in the US, the District of Columbia became the latest jurisdiction to vote to decriminalise marijuana.

There's been a sea change in public attitudes towards the drug in America.

In the space of less than 10 years, public support for marijuana legalisation has gone from around 25 per cent to almost 60 per cent.

Much of that has to do with the medical marijuana revolution, which began in San Francisco back in 1996.

Ben Knight reports from Washington, DC.

BEN KNIGHT: Not surprisingly, there are lots of reasons for the shift in public support for marijuana law reform in the US.

One of them is simply demographics. As the baby boomers get older, there are simply more people who have had some kind of experience smoking dope, including this guy:

BARACK OBAMA: I didn't have a dad in the house, and I was angry about it, even though I didn't necessarily realise it at the time. I made bad choices. I got high, without always thinking about the harm that it could do. I didn't always take school as seriously as I should have. And the only difference is that I grew up in an environment that was a little bit more forgiving. So when I made a mistake, the consequences were not as severe.

BEN KNIGHT: It was a powerful message from president Barack Obama, because he didn't just admit that he'd used marijuana, but that he'd misused it, and that he'd been luckier than a lot of other teenagers - especially black teenagers.

In many places in this country, minorities make up the vast bulk of marijuana arrests. But this is an issue that unites the left and right wings of politics.

Libertarian Republicans look at the amount of taxpayer money that goes into marijuana prosecutions - and the cost to society - and they compare that to the tax dollars they see coming back in from states that have legal medical marijuana.

Others on the right take the view that the government simply shouldn't be regulating what people choose to do in their own lounge rooms.

Now the debate is of course far from over, and there are very real concerns, particularly about the effect of marijuana on young developing minds, and what kind of message legalising it - or even just decriminalising it - sends to teenagers.

But there's little doubt that either that marijuana supporters are winning that debate. And a lot of that has to do with medical marijuana.

(Rabbi Jeffery Kahn enters)

BEN KNIGHT: Jeffery, how are you?

JEFFERY KAHN: Great. Welcome - delighted that you're here.

BEN KNIGHT: Thank you, great to be here.

(Voiceover): This is the Takoma Wellness Centre in Washington, DC.

JEFFREY KAHN: This door leads to the dispensary.

BEN KNIGHT: Wow, look at it.

(Voiceover): There are thousands of centres like this in 20 states across the US. The owner of this one is Rabbi Jeffrey Kahn.

JEFFREY KAHN: Many of our patients are older. They have never had an experience with cannabis.

BEN KNIGHT: He started this business with his wife Stephanie in 2010.

Their only experience with marijuana was through Stephanie's parents, both of whom used medical marijuana but who had to do it illegally.

STEPHANIE KAHN: We really saw what it could do, but we also saw the fear that they had.

BEN KNIGHT: Stephanie's father was first, after he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

STEPHANIE KAHN: Back in the 70s, the doctors started saying 'try marijuana.' And this was the 70s - he had a teenage daughter, and he was a very straight-laced businessman - and he was like, 'no, I'm not going to.'

But eventually he ended up trying it and it made a huge difference. It helped his spasms, it helped his neuropathies in his fingers and his feet, and it helped pain - it really helped him.

But we were all scared to death. I mean this was, again, the 70s and my parents particularly were afraid that someone was going to go knocking down their door and arrest them.

BEN KNIGHT: Then, after her father died, the family moved from Miami to Washington, where Stephanie's mother was diagnosed with cancer.

STEPHANIE KAHN: We hadn't been living here, we didn't know anybody, we couldn't get anything for her, she couldn't. And so she essentially was diagnosed in June 2009, and died in august 2009, and she wasted away. And the doctor kept saying 'you really need to try some of this and to use it just so you can take something down - eat something.'

BEN KNIGHT: This was at exactly the time that the District of Columbia voted to legalise medical marijuana. Stephanie and Jeffrey didn't think twice about opening their own dispensary.

STEPHANIE KAHN: I just fell in love with the idea. This would be something in my parents' memory. We can open some place that they could have gone to, that people like them could go to and feel safe and get help.

I get choked up every time I talk about this.

It was really important that we could do something here in their neighbourhood. It just meant a lot.

BEN KNIGHT: Tell me about your patients. I mean, do they remind you of your parents?

STEPHANIE KAHN: Yes, a number of them do, it's really amazing.

JEFFREY KAHN: I think that we're going to find some form of legalisation in just about every state. It's what's happening - there really isn't significant opposition, and I think that the old laws just don't really make any sense to anyone anymore.

BEN KNIGHT: This is Ben Knight in Washington for Correspondents Report.

http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2014/s3969374.htm