Over the past twenty-seven years I have seen many people struggling with pain management who use food as a comfort or coping tool. Some of these people had a coexisting addictive disorder that they put into remission by getting in recovery and were doing a good job with their pain management until they crossed over into using food compulsively or addictively. Many of them would put on weight and that would start sabotaging their pain management, which would eventually lead to inappropriate medication use once again. At some point they needed to make a decision to look at their relationship with eating.

It is very important when you are confronted with a decision to make a significant lifestyle change that you carefully weigh the pros and cons (i.e., benefits and disadvantages) of making that transition. It is easy for many people who have been eating addictively to see the disadvantages or negative consequences of that behavior (i.e., obesity, heart problems, joint problems, etc.). Therefore, it is often difficult to admit that they mistakenly believe there is a benefit to eating addictively—in this case to help cope with their chronic pain condition.

Some people use eating to cope with uncomfortable emotions or to deal with the consequences of having poor social skills and lack of friendships. Others use eating to avoid intimacy by making food their best friend. There must be some benefits to your eating inappropriately or you wouldn’t have started eating to cope instead of for fuel. These benefits are sometimes called secondary gains. Being open to seeing that this may be a problem is the first step toward change.

To read a bit more about this topic that includes a review of the Eating Addiction Relapse Prevention Workbook please check out my article Eating Addiction Needs a Strategic Relapse Prevention Protocol that you can download for free on our Article page.

If you’d like to receive training for helping people with relapse prevention, I’m very excited to announce that the Gorski-CENAPS Corporation is presenting The Relapse Prevention Therapy44 Hour Certification Training in Ft. Lauderdale October 18-22, 2010. To learn more about this 5 day 44 hour training you can check out our Calendar 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, and are experiencing problems with using food to cope or other eating addiction problems please go to our Publications page and check out my book; the Eating Addiction Relapse Prevention Workbook. Many of my patients have found benefit from completing this workbook.  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.
 

In most cases, anxiety about living with pain is more likely in the acute pain stage while depression prevails in the chronic pain stage. A sub-acute stage occurs after the acute stage but before the chronic stage. It usually occurs at about the three- to six-month range. At the acute stage the person in pain generally feels a reasonable sense of hope that the pain will resolve within the near future. In the sub-acute stage and at the beginning of the chronic stage, people’s thoughts and emotions about the pain begin to change.

It is not uncommon for the person to begin to wonder if the pain will ever go away or if they’ll ever get better. These types of thoughts lead to anxiety. Although most people believe that their anxiety will subside when the pain goes away, the anxiety frequently leads to a significant increase in pain perception. This results in a vicious cycle of pain, anxiety, more pain, and more anxiety.  When the pain continues for longer than six months and people haven’t yet learned to manage their anxiety the symptoms will only get worse.

Anxiety can occur at different intensities, all the way from mild nervousness to full blown panic attacks.  Anxiety can be characterized by the following:

1. Muscle tension, including shakiness, jitteriness, trembling, muscle aches, fatigue, restlessness, and inability to relax.
2. Nervous system hyperactivity, including sweaty palms, heart racing, dry mouth, upset stomach, diarrhea, lump in throat, shortness of breath, etc.
3. Apprehensive expectations, including anxiety, worry, fear, anticipation of misfortune.
4. Trouble concentrating, including distractibility, insomnia, feelings of edginess or irritability, and impatience.

Excess anxiety and tension can cause people to experience heightened emotional upset (anxiety, depression, anger), increased pain, slower healing times, and increased side-effects to medications, among other things. An ongoing stress response causes numerous negative problems such as increasing muscle tension and pain while also decreasing the activity of their immune system and blood flow to their extremities.  This in turn worsens a person’s perception of their pain and the pain condition continues to worsen and needs specialized treatment.

Psychological treatment for chronic pain focuses on the emotional toll people experience living with pain on a daily basis. The treatment for chronic pain does not include magical interventions; rather, it is a combination of proven psychological treatment approaches in addition to medication management and other non-chemical interventions that addresses all the issues people in chronic pain experience. 

To learn about the need for multimodal chronic pain management please check out my article Chronic Pain Management Needs More Than a Quick Fix that you can download for free on our Article page.

If you’d like to receive training for helping people with relapse prevention, I’m very excited to announce that the Gorski-CENAPS Corporation is presenting The Relapse Prevention Therapy44 Hour Certification Training in Ft. Lauderdale October 18-22, 2010. To learn more about this 5 day 44 hour training you can check out our Calendar 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.

I came across a website I’d like to share with you; Health24.com.  I found a report that discussed recent research regarding people who were HIV Positive and were experiencing neuropathic pain symptoms.  One area that I found significant was up to 62 percent of HIV-infected patients develop extensive painful neurological pain extending into the legs that is either due to the disease itself or is a side effect of HIV drug treatment, according to a report in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management.

I’m including a portion of the report on the efficacy of using the capsaicin patch from Health24.com below and if you want to read the entire report please go to that website and search for Patch helps brain pain in HIV+.

The patch was applied once to affected areas for 60 minutes. The main outcome measure was the percent change in a pain rating scale score from the start of the study through two to 12 weeks after treatment.  Treatment with the patch produced a sustained reduction in pain scores of roughly 40 percent on average over the follow-up period. A treatment response, defined as a 30 percent or greater reduction in pain, was seen in eight patients (67 percent), including four with a 50 percent or greater reduction.

Most patients experienced an increase in pain during the 48 hours after the patch was applied, which resolved in the first week after treatment. Patch gives long-lasting relief except for the expected local pain and redness, “NGX-4010 was tolerated well, and no safety concerns were identified,” the investigators report.

“The most important finding is that the high-concentration capsaicin patch produced long-lasting (i.e. at least three months), significant pain relief in HIV-associated peripheral neuropathy with a good safety profile,” Simpson said. While encouraging, the results will need to be replicated in controlled trials, he added. “This is an exciting time in research of new treatments for neuropathic pain,” such as HIV-related pain, shingles and diabetic neuropathy, “with new drugs on the horizon.” – (Reuters Health)

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) are not helping or have to many side effects. 

Now we also have other non-opiate and ”recovery-friendly” transdermal patch delivery systems.  A transdermal patch is a medicated adhesive patch that is placed on the skin to deliver a specific dose of medication through the skin and into the bloodstream.

This type of delivery system promotes healing or relief to an injured area of the body. An advantage of a transdermal drug delivery route over other types such as oral, topical, etc is that it provides a controlled release of the medicament into the patient and avoids many of the side effects people experience when taking medication orally.  A wide variety of pharmaceuticals can be delivered by transdermal patches e.g., Lidoderm (lidocaine), Voltaren (NSAID) and other NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medications).

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 about the need for multimodal chronic pain management please check out my article The Need for Multidisciplinary Chronic Pain Management that you can download for free on our Article page.

If you’d like to receive training for helping people with relapse prevention, I’m very excited to announce that the Gorski-CENAPS Corporation is presenting The Relapse Prevention Therapy44 Hour Certification Training in Ft. Lauderdale October 18-22, 2010. To learn more about this 5 day 44 hour training  you can check out our Calendar 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.