What a Pain!

When I first told my 92-year-old Grandpa, a physician who is still practicing today, that my new business was serving clients with chronic pain, he said to me, “Chronic pain patients are a chronic pain.” As a respected and extremely competent physician, even he was admitting that he just didn’t know what to do these people. That’s a pretty hopeless situation to be as a suffering patient.

Chronic Pain affects about 51 million Americans. That’s 1 in every 5 people! As a nurse, I saw this firsthand in the patients I served. Most were on ibuprofen or similar drugs for pain, and then would eventually “graduate” to stronger drugs such as opioids or pain patches. Many of my patients had also tried many surgical procedures to alleviate their pain, and still found no relief. Pills and procedures. That’s the protocol for chronic pain in America. And that’s the trajectory of your treatment if you go to a traditional practitioner with chronic pain. A decent doctor might add physical therapy to the list.

But this protocol assumes that chronic pain is a result of tissue damage in the body. The fact is, even the most serious injuries heal in 3-6 months. So why does pain persist even after an injury is healed? Or why does pain start when there’s no sign of any injury at all? This is because most chronic pain is actually a result of learned pathways in the brain. In other words, the brain learns a bad habit of sending a pain signal even when there’s nothing wrong with your body. So, if we want to treat chronic pain, we treat the brain. We’ll learn more about how in another post!