As anyone who ever experienced a migraine headache knows it can be extremely debilitating—I know this first hand as someone who experiences periodic migraines and in fact had one of my most serious episodes all day today. It was once again imperative that I practice what I teach; although today I did not do as good a job as usual but I did learn some valuable lessons yet again.

One thing I believe is that unless a chronic migraine patient goes to a treatment provider who understands appropriate interventions for this condition, they can run the risk of unnecessary pain and suffering, including the possibility of prescription drug addiction. Many people are given opiates for migraine treatment even though they are not an FDA approved medication.

Medications Used To Manage A Migraine
Headache Fall Into Two Broad Categories

Pain-relieving medications. Also known as acute or abortive treatment, these types of drugs are taken during migraine attacks and are designed to stop symptoms that have already begun.

Preventive medications. These types of drugs are taken regularly, often on a daily basis, to reduce the severity or frequency of migraines.

Unfortunately, in the realm of Migraine treatment, little emphasis is placed on whether the medications have been specifically FDA approved for the treatment of Migraine since so few are FDA approved for the prevention of it. In fact, there is not a single medication that was originally developed for Migraine prevention. All were originally developed for other purposes. When it comes to treating Migraine attacks (acute treatment), however, this is not the case. There are seven triptans (Imitrex, Maxalt, Zomig, Amerge, Axert, Frova, and Relpax) that were developed for and FDA approved as Migraine abortive (management) medications. These medications work to actually stop the Migrainous process in the brain and stop the Migraine attack and its associated symptoms.

Ergotamine medications (used as vasoconstrictors for migraine prevention and are sometimes mixed with caffeine) such as DHE and Migranal; they are also FDA approved for Migraine treatment as is Midrin (a combination of acetaminophen, dichloralphenazone, and isometheptene). The NHF study also involved prescription pain relieving medications, which cannot abort a Migraine, as well as the triptans. Thus, the issue here is not so much FDA approval of acute medications, but the difference between using “generic pain medications” as opposed to Migraine-specific medications.

To learn more about this topic—as well as other postings on headache pain management—please go to our research page and scroll down to the posting titled Information and Guidelines for Migraine Management that you can download for free on our News & Research 2008 Archive page.

If you would like to be skill trained in a treatment model that teaches how to implement a multidisciplinary treatment plan we have an Addiction-Free Pain Management® 20 Hour Certification Training scheduled this Spring at Valley Forge Medical Center and Hospital in Noristown PA on June 10-12, 2009. It’s not to late for people to sign up and in fact by mentioning this Blog I will make sure you get a $20 discount for this training. To get this discount you must call my partner Ellen at (916) 575-9961 and ask her for the discount. Also, for this and other upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page.

Today I would like to inform you about the telephone Addiction-Free Pain Management® (APM) Coaching services we offer. If you’re not sure if coaching is for you (or your clients) please go to our Coaching page and click on the Coaching Questionnaire link near the end of the page. If you’re interested in receiving free information and an overview of these services go our Contact page and send a request for this information. Below I want to cover why we believe APM™ Coaching works and the benefits you can receive from coaching.

Why APM™ Coaching Works

The main reason APM™ coaching works is that you’re hiring someone with greater experience than you in pain management and relapse prevention. Your APM™ Certified coach can quickly identify patterns that may not be clear to you. Then your coach can help you devise and implement solutions. When this works well, it’s a very high-leverage relationship. It’s one of the fastest ways to solve challenging problems. Similarly, a good coach will have superior knowledge and experience in the area(s) in which you want to improve.

A coach can use all of this expertise to help you solve specific problems efficiently. This is essentially a variation on the principle of overwhelming force. A pain management or relapse prevention problem that may seem daunting to you might be a fairly simple matter for an experienced APM™ coach.

The real challenge of APM™ coaching is for your coach to help you implement the solutions to your specific problems. Coming up with solutions is easy. Implementing those solutions is the hard part. That’s where good APM™ coaching really performs. Your APM™ coach can work as a guide to help you stay on track, leading you safely through the quagmire of mistakes, blind alleys, and delays.

Benefits of APM™ Coaching

Achievement means the delivery extraordinary results and individual goals achieved, strategies, projects and plans executed. It suggests effectiveness, creativity, and innovation. Effective APM™ coaching delivers achievement, which is sustainable. Because of the emphasis on learning and because your confidence is enhanced (’I worked it out for myself!’) the increase in performance is typically sustained for a longer period and will impact on areas that were not directly the subject of coaching.

Fulfillment includes learning and development. To achieve the result is one thing, to achieve it in a way in which you learn and develop as part of the process has a greater value - to you and your coach, for it is the capacity to learn that ensures your going quality of life. Fulfillment also includes the notion that going through coaching you begin to identify goals that are intrinsically rewarding. With fulfillment comes an increase in motivation. That the APM™ coach respects you, your ideas and opinions, that you are doing your work in your own way, that you are pursuing your own goals and are responsible - all this makes you much more inspired and committed.

Joy. Enjoyment ensues when people are achieving their meaningful goals and when learning and developing is part of the process.

These three components – achievement, fulfillment, and joy – are synergistically interlinked and the absence of any one will impact and erode the others. Learning without achievement quickly exhausts your energy. Achievement without learning soon becomes boring. The absence of joy and fun erodes the human spirit.

To learn about the my views on quality treatment please go to my article The Right to Quality Chronic Pain Management that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

If you would like to be skill trained in a treatment model that teaches how to implement a multidisciplinary treatment plan we have an Addiction-Free Pain Management®Training scheduled this Spring at Valley Forge Medical Center and Hospital in Noristown PA in June. It’s not to late for people to sign up and in fact by mentioning this Blog I will make sure you get a $20 discount for this training. To get this discount you must call my partner Ellen at (916) 575-9961 and ask her for the discount. Also, for this and other upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page.

Over the years I have been very outspoken about the need for people in recovery, who have an addictive disorder, to stop smoking.  About five years ago I was working with a doctor at a pain clinic who had done extensive research on the effects smoking has on pain management.  I would like to share a study that demonstrated that people who were living with neuropathic pain and continued to smoke were actually amplifying their level of pain. This was published in 2005 by the Journal of Spinal Cord Medicine Volume 28(4): 330-332.  I’m going to insert a portion of that report below.

The first subject rated his pain as 4/10 when not smoking and 7/10 when smoking. The pain subsided 30 minutes after smoking was discontinued. He noted an immediate increase in neuropathic pain when smoking. The second subject quit smoking for 1 month and immediately noted that the pain disappeared, rating it 0/10. After he resumed smoking, his radicular pain was 8.5/10 in the morning and 5/10 in afternoon.

This particular study focused on people with spinal cord injuries (SCI) and neuropathic pain, but the findings could translate to any type of neuropathic pain, whatever the trigger or pain generator was.  I have seen many patients quit smoking over the years and almost all that stopped reported an improvement in their pain levels.  Many of them did not have SCI or neuropathic pain, but even so they reported improvement in their pain management.

For an article with my views about smoking download my free article Smoking and Recovery Just Don’t Mix .

You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are working with people in chronic pain management or are living with chronic pain yourself and have any resistance or denial and want to learn how to develop a plan for helping to identify and manage denial please go to our Publications page and check out my book the Denial Management Counseling for Effective Pain Management Workbook. To purchase this book please Click Here.

We have an APM™ Certification Trainings scheduled at Valley Forge Medical Center and Hospital in June. It’s not to late for people to sign up and in fact by mentioning this Blog I will make sure you get a $20 discount for this training. To get this discount you must call Ellen at (916) 575-9961 and ask her for the discount. Also, for these and other upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page.

To listen to a radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods for her program One Hour at a Time please Click Here to go to this interview.

To read the latest issue of Chronic Pain Solutions Newsletter please Click here. If you want to sign up for the newsletter, 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.