Chronic pain management affects the whole person. You can generally receive effective medical care for acute pain; however, chronic pain management treatment can be a confusing process of misunderstanding as well as incorrect diagnoses and inadequate treatment plans.

What can you do when you are told that the pain is all in your head?

When you experience chronic pain and doctors are at a loss to define the exact nature of the problem, you might start to believe that you are going crazy. Often treatment professionals will support that mistaken belief because they find no observable or measurable reason for the symptoms. Nevertheless, chronic pain is real and often occurs for reasons that may not be identified easily. As explained earlier, chronic pain affects you physically, psychologically, socially and spiritually—body, mind, spirit.

Physically, chronic pain raises stress and drains physical energy

Psychologically, chronic pain affects your ability to think clearly, logically and rationally, to manage feelings and emotions effectively

Socially chronic pain affects your ability to use consistently responsible behaviors, thus affecting others

Spiritually, chronic pain can keep you separate from your inner self and/or Higher Power

In addition, the way that you sense or experience pain—its intensity and duration—will affect how well you are able to succeed with your chronic pain management. This can lead to either pain or suffering. Pain is an unpleasant signal telling you that something is wrong with your body. Suffering results from the meaning or interpretation you assign to the pain. Learning more positive ways of thinking about your pain will lead to more effective pain management.

When you experience chronic pain it is usually accepted that something is physically wrong with your body. The symptoms of chronic pain can range from mildly irritating, to somewhat annoying or uncomfortable, to moderately distressing, to severely horrible, to the worst possible excruciating suffering ever!

While you are affected biologically, other areas are also impacted. Your thought processes are impacted in several different ways. You might have difficulty thinking clearly or concentrating, which leads to being unable to solve problems that are normally easy for you. At times you may be unable to function very well in practically all areas of your life. Instead of thinking positively you may repress certain thoughts and blank out, or indulge in self-defeating, negative or depressive thinking.

The chronic pain management process can also lead to difficulty in managing emotions. You may be cut off from your emotions, feel numb or not know what you are feeling. At other times you may overreact to your emotions. The intensity of your feelings does not match the trigger situation. A third type of emotional dysfunction is when you experience artifact emotions—feelings that do not seem to have a clear cause or trigger; e.g., you cry,  laugh, or even rage for no apparent reason.

Remember that pain is a true biopsychosocial experience. As a result, you need to learn to make a distinction between the physical sensation of pain, your psychological interpretation of the pain, and how you use your pain in relationships with other people. Once you have this it’s time to develop an appropriate chronic pain management plan for all parts of yourself—biological, psychological, social, and spiritual.

To learn about the importance of treating the whole person for effective chronic pain management please check out my article The Biopsychosocial Components of Chronic Pain Management, that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are working with people undergoing chronic pain management and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing their chronic pain and coexisting psychological disorders including depression, addiction and other coexisting psychological disorders effectively please consider my book Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders: Using the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System. To purchase this book please Click Here.

To learn about my upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page.

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.

It’s estimated that between 70 to 100 million people in this country are undergoing—or have undergone—chronic pain management; including me. When you live with chronic pain you hurt. Doing certain things can make you hurt worse. So you come to believe that these things will always cause you to hurt. In other words, you associate those things with pain. You believe that every time you do those things, you will have pain.

Because you believe that you are going to hurt, you can activate the physical pain system just by thinking about doing something that you believe will cause you to hurt. This is called anticipatory pain. This is when you anticipate that something will make you hurt, which in turn activates the biological pain system. You start hurting even before you begin doing whatever it is that you believe will cause you to hurt. All you have to do is to start thinking about doing that thing.

Once the physical pain system is activated, the anticipatory pain reaction can actually make the pain symptoms worse. Whenever you feel the pain, you interpret it in a way that makes it worse. You start thinking about the pain in a way that actually makes it worse. You tell yourself that the pain is “awful and terrible,” and that “I can’t handle the pain.” You convince yourself that “it’s hopeless, I’ll always hurt, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

This way of thinking causes you to develop emotional reactions that further intensify or amplify the pain response. The increased perception of pain causes you to keep changing your behavior in ways that create even more unnecessary limitations and more emotional discomfort. This can make you feel trapped in a progressive cycle of disability.

Because of the two parts—biological (pain) and psychological (suffering)—chronic pain management must also have two components: physical and psychological. The way you sense or experience pain—its intensity and duration—will affect how well you are able to manage it.

In 2007 I wrote published an article titled Coping with Anticipatory Pain that is on our Article Archive. This month I decided to publish a new article titled Moving Beyond Anticipatory Pain for Effective Chronic Pain Management, that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you or a loved one is undergoing chronic pain management, especially if you’re in recovery or believe you may have a medication or other mental health problem and you want to learn more effective chronic pain management tools, please go to our Publications page and check out my books; especially the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. To purchase this book please Click Here.

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.

To learn about my 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.

Up until recently there was a lack of information and a great deal of misinformation regarding the role of proper nutrition for effective chronic pain management. The purpose of this section is to introduce you to some of the methods used as a part of the APM treatment approach.

Recent research studies by the National Fibromyalgia Association (NFA) have confirmed that diet and nutrition play a significant role in the management of pain. The NFA (2006) reports that success relies upon utilizing a multidisciplinary and multidimensional approach, incorporating lifestyle and dietary changes to achieve optimum health and well being.

The NFA also states that nutritional therapy practitioners are successfully using diet to treat and prevent illness, and restore the body to a natural healthy equilibrium. Some healthcare practitioners believe that deficiencies of minerals and vitamins could be responsible for much of the disease and weakness in the body. Examples of conditions resulting from deficiencies include fatigue, lethargy and susceptibility to colds and viruses.

The role of proper diet and exercise as a part of addictive disorder recovery has been recognized for a long time. There is a significant amount of information about this in the recovery literature, such as the books Passages Through Recovery (Gorski, 1989) and Staying Sober (Gorski, & Miller, 1986).

Nutrition and Pain: Foods That Help or Hinder

Although diet has little effect on a person’s experience of pain, it probably influences pain perception by the way it is associated with inflammation.  When metabolized, some fats and fatty acids may have a tendency to intensify the inflammation response, so their intake should be closely monitored. In addition, certain foods act as triggers for certain pain conditions, such as migraine headaches.

Some of the problem substances that are linked to increases in pain are caffeine, alcohol, monosodium glutamate (MSG) and aspartame (NutraSweet®). On the other hand, some foods have been credited with pain reduction—e.g., cherries (Anthocyanins, which give tart cherries their deep red color, have anti-inflammatory properties similar to those in aspirin) and soy (It can help relieve some osteoarthritis pain). Dr. Margaret Caudill in her book Managing Pain Before it Manages You, reports some foods linked to decrease in pain include vegetarian diets as well as diets high in complex carbohydrates and low in protein.

The use of a food diary can be beneficial in discovering which foods may be a part of the problem or part of the solution. For optimal success this should be done under the supervision of your doctor or nutritionist.  Consumption of bioflavonoids, as found in fresh cherries, as well as eating other foods such as vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and some types of nuts can supplement some of the vitamins that may be deficient in people with chronic pain.

However, caution must be used when taking vitamin and mineral supplements, especially with the tendency of chronic pain patients to use megadoses—the mistaken belief being that if a little is good a lot is better. Two conditions that seem to respond well to dietary changes are rheumatoid arthritis and gout.

To read more about the role nutrition in chronic pain management please check out our News and Research Page 2008 Archive, and scroll down to my post titled Diet and Nutrition for Chronic Pain Management.

To learn about the importance of using a team approach for chronic pain management please check out my article The Need for Multidisciplinary Chronic Pain Management, that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are working with people undergoing chronic pain management and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing their chronic pain and coexisting psychological disorders including depression, addiction and other coexisting psychological disorders effectively please consider my book Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders: Using the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System. To purchase this book please Click Here.  

To learn about my upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page.

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.