When it comes to the rate of chronic headaches in the United States, several studies have shown that roughly 45 million Americans suffer from them per year. There is an average of 20 million females in America that experience chronic headaches and an average of 25 million males. This represents a prevalence of chronic headaches that is roughly 1 out of every six people. Percentage-wise, 6.54 percent of all Americans experience the agony of a chronic headache condition. To learn more check out our latest News & Research post Nerve Stimulation Therapy for Chronic Headache Pain.

Below are seven strategic steps that I believe are necessary for people living with chronic headache pain—or any other chronic pain management condition—need to learn in order to obtain appropriate and effective chronic pain management. The rational and more in depth explanation for each of the following steps can be found in my book the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide.

Seven Steps for Overcoming Obstacles

Step One: Developing an Initial Multidisciplinary Pain Management Plan. The first step of effective pain management is utilizing a multidisciplinary assessment protocol. You first need to objectively examine your current pain management program. You should list each of the medications and non-pharmacological pain management interventions you are currently using and answer pertinent questions about each one. You also need to list your professional and personal support system, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Step Two: Looking At Pain Objectively. This step explores how to increase your understanding of your pain and how to use that knowledge to improve your chronic pain management. You need to learn the different aspects of pain—acute and chronic—and the bio-psycho-social components of pain as well as the difference between pain and suffering. You should learn about the stress-pain connection and how to rate your stress and pain levels accurately. Finally, you need to explore how your thinking, emotions, behaviors, and social relationships change when you’re having a “bad” chronic pain management day.

Step Three: Understanding and Managing Depression. Since depression frequently affects people in chronic pain, in this component you need objective and easy to understand information about depression and what constitutes effective depression management. You should learn how to accurately rate the type and level of depression symptoms you experience and then develop your own personal six-step depression management plan.

Step Four: Exploring Effective Use of Medication. This component starts with educating patients about some common, and possibly misunderstood, terms like medication abuse, dependency, pseudo addiction, and addiction. Patients need to learn how to use a Red Flags checklist to see if they have a problematic relationship with their pain medication. They also need to learn the role of denial and finally explore the benefits and disadvantages of using appropriate pain medication.

Step Five: Developing An Effective Chronic Pain Management Plan. In this step you need to learn the concept of developing a Pain Management Agreement and how to deal with urges/cravings that could tempt you to use pain medication in an inappropriate manner. You also need to develop a nonpharmacological (non-medication) pain management plan and learn to utilize a pain journaling process to increase your chronic pain management skills.

Step Six: Exploring Biological versus Psychological/Emotional Symptoms. This step focuses on understanding the ascending versus descending pain signals and exploring and scoring your biological and psychological/emotional pain symptoms. You also need to look at how your TFUARs (thinking, feeling, urges, actions, and social reactions) change on a bad pain day and how to manage your TFUARs more effectively.

Step Seven: Finalizing Your Chronic Pain Management Plan. This step ties everything together by teaching you how to identify and rate your bio-psycho-social-spiritual chronic pain management goals. Then you need to learn how to improve your existing chronic pain management foundation and test this new plan to make sure it is effective.

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.