For decades the chemical dependency research literature has established the effectiveness of teaching meditation and relaxation techniques to patients with addictive disorders.  The pain literature also indicates the importance of using relaxation to help reduce the level of pain that patients experience.  For example in her book Managing Pain Before it Manages You, Dr. Margaret Caudill (2001) explains how to evoke what she calls the Relaxation Response in order to reduce stress and pain.

There are many books and audiocassettes that teach patients how to use meditation and relaxation exercises to reduce stress and anxiety.  There is also a strong stress-pain connection that is crucial to understand for more effective chronic pain management.  But remember, in most cases if patients can learn to lower their stress level, they will also experience a decrease in their level of pain.

Meditation is a fairly new phenomenon in our Western culture, but research shows that the origins of meditation go back at least five-thousand years. One type that I’ve found particularly helpful for my own chronic pain management and that I teach my patients is the Buddhist discipline of “mindfulness meditation.” This is a moment-to-moment awareness of what our bodies are doing. The goals of meditation are to understand one’s mental processes, develop the power to control these processes and gain freedom from one’s mind-set.

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.

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 Articles page.

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 see an online overview of Cognit delivering Addiction-Free Pain Management® please go to this Link for a free demo.

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

Effective chronic pain management can involve both changes in diet and the use of dietary supplements, including vitamins, minerals, enzymes and other substances. Nutritional approaches can be used to help prevent pain, such as migraine headache, or reduce pain and inflammation as part of a comprehensive chronic pain management strategy.

However, a word of caution is in order here. Although nutritional approaches are often perceived to have fewer side effects than many medications, caution should be used as some nutrients are known to be unsafe in certain circumstances, when used with some medications, or at certain doses. The use of these nutritional approaches should be discussed with a knowledgeable healthcare professional.

Up until recently there was a shortage of information and a great deal of misinformation regarding the role of proper nutrition for effective chronic pain management. 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.

There is also substantial pain management literature emphasizing the importance of nutrition and exercise in the healing process and effective chronic pain management. In fact, Dr. Margaret Caudill (2001) devotes an entire chapter of her book—Managing Your Pain before it Manages You—to nutrition in an effective chronic pain management program.

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 see an online overview of Cognit delivering Addiction-Free Pain Management® please go to this Link for a free demo.

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