The Three Levels of Chronic Pain Management
Today pain management professionals systematically approache the treatment of pain at all three levels (bio-psycho-social) simultaneously. This means using physical treatments to reduce the intensity of your physical pain. It also means using psychological treatments to identify and change your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are making your pain more intense and replacing them with positive thinking, as well as feeling and behavior management skills that can reduce the intensity of your pain.
Finally, effective pain management must involve not only you, but also the significant people in your life who can help you to develop a social and cultural context in which to experience your pain in a way that will reduce suffering.
Biological pain is a signal that something is going wrong with your body. The biological, or physical, pain sensations are critical to human survival. Without pain we would have no way of knowing that something was wrong with our body. So without pain we would be unable to take action to correct the problem or deal with the situation that is causing our pain.
Psychological Pain results from the meaning that you assign to the pain signal. The psychological symptoms include both cognitive (thinking changes) and emotional (uncomfortable feelings) that lead to suffering. Most people are not able to differentiate between the physical and psychological. All they know is “I hurt.” For effective pain management you need to learn all you can about your pain.
Social and Cultural Pain, results from the social and cultural meaning assigned by other people to the pain you are experiencing, and whether or not the pain is recognized as being severe enough to warrant a socially approved sick role. These three components determine whether the signal from your body to your brain is interpreted as pain or suffering.
Imagin the following vignet: Bob is his college’s star football player. In last week’s homecoming game Bob scored the winning touchdown but broke his arm in the process. This week Bob is sitting on the bench with a cast on his arm that everyone has signed. This cast and how he earned it are seen as an honorable reason for him to be sitting on the bench. In that same game Karl, a big hulking lineman, “tweaked” his back and was also sitting on the bench this week. Unlike Bob, Karl doesn’t have an observable injury and people were asking him why he wan’t out on the field helping his team. Karl is much more apt than Bob to experience shame/guilt, which will probably amplify his pain symptoms.
To learn more about the three levels of chronic pain management check out my article The Biopsychosocial Components of Chronic Pain that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.
You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are in recovery and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing your pain and medication effectively go to our Publications page and check out my book the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. To purchase this book please Click Here.
We have a busy fall schedule for upcoming trainings that you can check out on our Calendar page.
To listen to a recent radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods for her program One Hour at a Time please Click Here to go to this interview.
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