Below are five classifications of nonpharmacological (non-medication) ways that people have learned to implement in order to manage their chronic pain.  You may already be implementing some of the examples listed below.  The important thing to remember is you can always improve your ability to intervene in a way that helps you obtain effective pain management.  Sometimes the intervention does need to include pain medication or medical procedures, but changing your medication protocols should only be done with your healthcare provider’s knowledge and permission. 

1. Relaxation: When you are in chronic pain your body’s automatic response often includes a reflexive tensing response. This problem leads to your being unable to relax the locus of the pain problems, which leads to increased muscle tension in these areas. You need to practice to consciously relax the affected muscles, enabling them to modulate your pain levels and bring the pain under your control without needing to increase your medication.
2. Increasing Activity and Fitness: Many people experiencing chronic pain become very sedentary, with strong avoidance tendencies for many types of activities. The two primary reasons for this are the pain itself, and your own predictions regarding the negative impact of activity. Therefore, it is crucial to return to more normal levels of activities and slowly increase your stamina for physical activities. The goal is to extinguish conditioned avoidance patterns.
3. Reducing Emotional Over-Reactivity: When you are experiencing intense uncomfortable emotions—especially about being in pain—your pain levels actually intensify. Your emotions become like an amplifier circuit that increases the “volume” of your pain.  You need to practice specific methods of reducing this automatic process that occurs in the face of stressful triggers. You need to realize that you may not be able to eliminate these problematic emotional triggers but what you can learn are different methods of reacting and managing your feelings.
4.  External Focusing/Distracting: The more you focus on your pain the more you actually intensify your experience of the pain. You need to learn to shift and manipulate your focus of attention in a positive way, which will minimize your experience of the pain. This can be accomplished by changing how you think and feel about your pain. You can then find pleasant activities or tasks to take your focus off of your pain. 
5. Using Anything That Works: There are numerous interventions that you can attempt to help manage your chronic pain. In addition to those listed above you can use breathing, muscle relaxation, visual imagery, music, cold/heat, stretching, massage therapy, stress management, acupuncture, acupressure,  TENS Unit, journaling, hydrotherapy, etc.

If you want to learn more about non-medication management of chronic pain please go to our website at www.addiction-free.com or go right to our Publications page to check out my APM Module Three: Understanding and Developing Effective Pain Management.  You can also check out our Ariticles page to download any of my free articles.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.