Most of the chronic pain research I have reviewed over the past two decades has been very clear about treatment outcomes. The best prognosis occurs when you are proactive in your own treatment process.  One way to do this is to learn as much as you can about your pain and effective pain management.

Knowledge is power.  Once you know what is really going on with your body and mind, you can start taking action to effectively manage your pain.  In fact, it is vital that you begin to see pain as your friend, instead of your enemy.  I know this is much easier said than done.  In fact many of my patients have looked at me like I’m crazy when I tell them they must make peace with their pain —and not only that, pain can be their friend.  Most people have a difficult time believing that, but nevertheless it is true.  Pain can be our friend. 

Think of putting your hand on a hot burner of a stove.  The pain you feel lets you know, and very quickly at that, to remove your hand. Pain sensations are essential for human survival.  Without pain you would have no way of knowing that something was wrong with your body.  So without pain you would be unable to take action to correct the problem or situation that is causing the condition.  With chronic pain management it is crucial that you take the correct type of action, or you could be trapped in an addiction.

In order to really understand pain management you need to first understand the concept of pain. Pain is a signal from the body to the brain that tells you that something is wrong.  There are three components of pain—biological, psychological, and social/cultural.  Pain is a total biopsychosocial experience. 

You hurt physically.  You psychologically respond to the pain by thinking, feeling, and acting.  You think about the pain and try to figure out what is causing it and why you’re hurting.  You experience emotional reactions to the pain.  You may get angry, frightened, or frustrated by your pain.  You talk about your pain with family, friends, and coworkers who help you to develop a social and cultural context for assigning meaning to your personal pain experience, which hopefully leads to taking appropriate action.

The psychological meaning that you assign to a physical pain signal will determine whether you simply feel pain (“Ouch, this hurts!”) or you experience suffering (“Because I hurt, something awful or terrible is happening!”). 

Although pain and suffering are often used interchangeably, there is an important distinction that needs to be made.  Pain is an unpleasant signal telling you that something is wrong with your body.  Suffering results from the meaning or interpretation your brain assigns to the pain signal. 

Also, it’s important to remember
Pain is inevitable but suffering is definitely optional.

To learn more about pain and suffering please check out my article Pain is Inevitable but Suffering is Optional when Living with Chronic Pain Management that you can download for free on our Article 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.

Today I want to announce we have now added Addiction-Free Pain Management® to the Cognit system. What is Cognit?  Simply put Cognit is a powerful new web-based recovery tool. 

Cognit provides individuals, treatment centers and other organizations who offer addiction and/or mental health treatment with web-based educational and self-awareness tools. Cognit supports and enhances all stages, as well as modalities, of treatment and recovery for people who suffer from addiction and related mental health issues. The Cognit process combines educational content, self application E-Workbook exercises, session quizzes as well as self-awareness inventories that were developed by Cognit co-founder Wayne Blampied.

The Cognit system acts as a support umbrella from pre-treatment, to the earliest stages of treatment and all the way through late recovery.  No matter what course recovery takes, Cognit supports the entire process. The true value of Cognit is in its ability to assist in the treatment process by offering effective, consistent, science-based, easy to use educational content and its ability to assess and quantify a patient’s progress.

Cognit utilizes the intellectual property developed by Terence Gorski and Dr. Stephen Grinstead.  Access to decades of content by these two leaders in the field of addiction and Addiction-Free Pain Management® makes Cognit unique in the addiction and mental health treatment industry.  These science-based tools have stood the test of time and have helped thousands of recovering people obtain and maintain sobriety.

Mr. Gorski and Dr. Grinstead are both co-founders of Cognit. Together these two individuals have collectively trained well over 75,000 addiction and mental health treatment professionals during a 40 year span of specialized training and seminars. Mr. Gorski has also sold over 1.1 M books on relapse prevention and/or addiction; with Learning to Live Again selling over 300,000 copies.

Cognit is not treatment. It enhances and facilitates addiction and mental health treatment through its educational and self-awareness tools. Cognit quantifies a patient’s program and personal progress through a series of quizzes, assessments, exercises and self-awareness inventories. Cognit extends the educational window into the period before traditional treatment, during treatment and post treatment.  The extension of this window allows treatment providers to focus more on therapy and less on education. Cognit assists in the therapeutic process by providing counselors with an in-depth perspective into a patient’s issues without the investment of valuable time to gather that information. 

Cognit’s web-based education programs and self-awareness tools include quantitative tracking and monitoring modules that can be used by clinicians and treatment centers to measure across a limitless spectrum of issues that can quantify a patient’s progress over time. Agencies that fund addiction services are looking for quantified results from the addiction service providers that they fund.  Cognit provides clients, providers and agencies with quantified treatment results that span all phases of pre-treatment, treatment and post treatment.

To see an online overview of Cognit please go to this Link for a free demo. Check back later this week for a free demo of the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Cognit program.

You can learn 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 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.

Neuropathic pain is a complex chronic pain state that is usually accompanied by tissue injury.  With this type of pain, the nerve fibers themselves may be damaged, dysfunctional or injured. These damaged nerve fibers send erroneous signals to other pain centers in your brain.  The impact of nerve fiber injury includes a change in nerve function both at the site of injury and areas around the injury.

According to the Neuropathic Pain Network, somewhere between five to twenty-three million people (that’s between 2 to 8 percent of our population) are living with neuropathic pain in the United States. Unfortunately, it is a syndrome that is often under-diagnosed and under-treated.

Some of the symptoms of neuropathic pain including shooting pain, burning pain, tingling, and numbness.  An example of neuropathic allodynia—a non-harmful stimulus perceived as painful—is rough clothing rubbing on your skin which you feel as if it were sandpaper; another example would be someone shaking your hand in what is really a gentle grasp but you feel it as crushing or excruciating.

Another striking example of neuropathic pain is called phantom limb syndrome.  This occurs when a limb like an arm or a leg has been removed because of illness or injury.  The brain still receives (or perceives) pain messages from the nerves that originally carried impulses from the missing limb.  These nerves now misfire and cause pain.

As anyone living with neuropathic pain knows the treatment can be frustrating and often ineffective.  While acute short-term pain is usually easy to manage and most chronic pain management conditions can be treated effectively, neuropathic pain can be a major treatment challenge for both patients and their healthcare providers.  Unfortunately, neuropathic pain often responds poorly to standard pain treatments and occasionally may get worse instead of better over time. For some people, it can lead to serious disability.

The capsaicin patch could be a much needed tool for many people experiencing neuropathic pain symptoms and find that other pain management medications (e.g., opiates or SSRI’s and SNRI’s) are not helping or have too many side effects.  Of course medication management is only one component of an effective pain management treatment plan. 

I believe that people also need to be developing nonpharmacological interventions as well as learning to better manage the psychological/emotional components of their pain.  For those symptoms cognitive behavioral and rational emotive therapeutic interventions give the best outcomes.

To learn more about effective chronic pain management check out my article The Need for Multidisciplinary Chronic Pain Management that you can download for free on our Article 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.