On July 23, 2008 I posted a blog about coping with pain flare ups and since then I have had many requests to expand on that.  Today I decided to write a little more about that and give six additional nonpharmacological interventions for pain flair ups. 

I will also again extend our offer to send you a copy of a the pain flare up plan from my Addiction-Free Pain Management® Workbook designed to help people manage pain flare ups. If you’d like to obtain a free copy of this exercise please go to our Contact Page to request my Pain Flare Up Plan and we will be happy to email it to you.

If you’re living with chronic pain it’s crucial to learn to learn how to manage your pain flare ups—Sometimes called recurrent acute pain.  In this article I want to give you five simple steps for managing these pain flare ups.  But first I want to explain what I mean by these terms.

First you have to determine what your base line of pain is, based on a 1-10 pain scale.  For some of you this may be levels 2-3, for others 4-5 and others may even be at 5-6.  This is the level of pain you experience pretty much every day.  Recurrent episodes are acute pain flare ups that might go as high as a level 7-8 on that pain scale.  These acute episodes are usually brief—anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or so in most cases.

When you live with chronic pain there are times when your pain levels will flare up.  Sometimes you can determine why, but other times it comes as a complete surprise.  No matter why your pain flares up, you need to find safe effective ways to cope with the amplified symptoms. This requires having a good plan in place—those who fail to plan, plan to fail!  I want to share very briefly six more interventions from my APM™ Workbook exercise below.

Following are six more of the hundreds of possible non-pharmacological (non-medication) ways that other people have learned in order to manage their pain flare-ups.  The important thing to remember is you can intervene in a way that helps you regain effective pain management.  Sometimes the intervention does need to be pain medication, but changing your medication protocols should only be done with your health care provider’s knowledge and permission.

1. Chiropractic Treatment
2. Yoga/Tai Chi
3. Swimming
4. Pain Journaling
5. Shiatsu/Watsu Therapy
6. TENS Units

Another thing about pain flare ups is how you think about them.  If you start thinking they will be terrible, horrible, debilitating, etc., then they will be.  I call this the Anticipatory Pain Syndrome. To learn how to address this syndrome you can read my article Coping with Anticipator Pain that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

If you want to learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System please check out our website at www.addiction-free.com. To learn more about how to develop an effective chronic pain management plan please go to our Publications page and check out my book the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. To look for my upcoming trainings please go to our Calendar page.

To read our latest Chronic Pain Solutions Newsletter please click here. To sign up for Chronic Pain Solutions, please click here and input your name and email address. You will then recieve an autoresponse email that you need to reply to in order to finalize enrollment.