SaveYourself.ca • Sensible advice for aches, pains & injuries
The only time I have “flare-ups” seems to be when I'm in a very “stressed-out” period. For instance, just this weekend, I was trying to film a short film that I helped write. However, I am no actor. On the first “shoot,” I was super anxious, lots of adrenaline pumping through me, and it was like I could actually feel the nerve endings in my wrists and hands becoming ultra-sensitive … like they were going to flare up if I did anything. And … they did. Just from lifting some light equipment that day, it pushed me over the edge. That experience alone made me more interested in the “nervous system” aspect of my problem.
Pain is not just a message from injured tissues that must be accepted at face value, but a complex experience that is thoroughly tuned by your brain. There is no pain without brain. Many discoveries about the physiology of pain12 have been painfully slow to reach the public, or even health professionals. This knowledge is useful and needs to be shared.
Professionals need it so that they can retreat from some unfortunate old attitudes about pain problems, such as, “if I don’t understand it, it must be all in your head” or “if it hurts, there must be a tissue issue.” Patients with chronic pain need the reassuring perspective, and the real therapeutic and effects of greater confidence and mental health. I can hardly imagine a better argument that we need a more biologically literate society.
The biology of pain is never really straightforward, even when it appears to be.
“Reconceptualising pain according to modern pain science”, Lorimer Moseley
One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.
Plainwater, by Anne Carson
Perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. Perception is inference.
Scratching an itch through the scalp to the brain, by Atul Gawande
This beautifully produced short video neatly summarizes many of the key points of the content of this article. It is produced by the Hunter Integrated Pain Service (HIPS), an Australian government agency. I have a few quibbles with the treatment advice provided, which I will discuss below.
Another fine video “summary” of a totally different sort: this genuinely funny and entertaining TED talk about a snake bite and pain neurology. No, really, you will actually laugh — it’s like stand-up comedy. Australia’s Lorimer Moseley (quote above), Professor of Clinical Neurosciences and tireless pain researcher, is one of the best public speakers I’ve ever seen — a must-watch for anyone with chronic pain, and the professionals who care for them. Does he say “groovy” just a couple times too many? Maybe! But it is groovy … mate.
Ramachandran said that “pain is an opinion” — which sounds like a flaky New Age mind-over-matter theory. But Ramachandran is no mystic or guru: he is a neurologist and scientist. The passage below, from his book, Phantoms in the Brain, is mainly known for the first handful of words, a brilliantly concise statement of the modern understanding of how pain works.
Pain is an opinion on the organism’s state of health rather than a mere reflective response to an injury. There is no direct hotline from pain receptors to ‘pain centers’ in the brain. There is so much interaction between different brain centers, like those concerned with vision and touch, that even the mere visual appearance of an opening fist can actually feed all the way back into the patient’s motor and touch pathways, allowing him to feel the fist opening, thereby killing an illusory pain in a nonexistent hand.
Phantoms in the Brain, by VS Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
He then tells the story of an extraordinary cure of a man with phantom limb pain, tortured by agony in a clenched fist that was not there. With a clever arrangement of mirrors, Ramachandran created the illusion that the man’s amputated arm was restored — a sort of “virtual” limb. The mere appearance of his phantom hand opening and closing normally cured his agonizing “spasms.” He felt better because of the illusion that he was better — because he thought he was better. It is one of the most curious anecdotes in all of pain science.
Since then, “mirror therapy” has been studied and applied in many ways. A good quality 2007 study showed that mirrors aren’t actually necessary to achieve this effect.3 Mirror therapy is probably just a “fun” way to visualize healthy movement — which also works quite well without a mirror!4
Stranger still are tales of severe pain without injury, illustrating that pain can be entirely in the mind. One of the strangest of these was reported in the British Medical Journal in 1995:
A builder aged 29 came to the accident and emergency department having jumped down on to a 15 cm nail. As the smallest movement of the nail was painful he was sedated with fentanyl and midazolam. The nail was then pulled out from below. When his boot was removed a miraculous cure appeared to have taken place. Despite entering proximal to the steel toecap the nail had penetrated between the toes: the foot was entirely uninjured.
JP Fisher, senior house officer, DT Hassan, senior registrar, N O’Connor, registrar, accident and emergency department, Leicester Royal Infirmary5
Extreme examples like this are rare, but probably not as exotic as you might think. More to the point, even if they are rare, for every case like this there must be hundreds more where the injury is real but the patient is convinced that the damage is much worse than it really is — with proportionately exaggerated pain. Happily, it also works the other way, and people may feel much less pain than they “should” when they don’t realize how bad the damage is.
Injury and pain are clearly not in lock step with each other. And yet that is exactly what nearly everyone assumed for a long, long time. And many professionals, even though they may “know” better, may forget how powerfully pain is influenced by perception.
For most of the history of medical science, and to a surprising degree even now, pain was believed to work more or less the way the French philosopher René Descartes described it: a straightforward signalling system.
Based on this model, almost everyone still assumes that any message sent to the brain by a certain kind of nerve will cause pain — that the nerve is “sending pain,” that the signal is pain — and therefore these nerves are routinely called “pain fibers,” an equivalence between signalling and pain baked right into the name, and it’s worse than just an oversimplification.
The labeling of nociceptors as pain fibers was not an admirable simplification, but an unfortunate trivialization under the guise of simplification.
The relationship of perceived pain to afferent nerve impulses, by Patrick Wall and McMahon SB, pp254–255
For several decades now, it’s been clear to pain scientists and neurologists that this simplistic, pain-fiber model is hopelessly inaccurate. In fact, they call it “the naïve view!”6 Even microscopic worms with only two trouble-detecting nerves, compared to our billions, have richer pain experiences than that, with ways in which their pain is an “opinion” — an interpreted experience, with some surprising sensitivity to context.7 And of course it makes complete evolutionary sense. Pain is clearly more useful as an experience when it is “smarter.”
So the way pain really works is much more complicated, interesting, and in some ways useful. A nerve should never be call a “pain” nerve. It doesn’t detect “pain.” It only detects some kind of stimulus in the tissue … and the brain decides what to make of it, and what to do about it, if anything.
So the brain is not just a passive, gullible receiver for whatever pain messages the peripheral nerves send upstairs. And, if you think about it, it’s kind of strange that we would ever have thought of it that way, because this is, after all, the brain we’re talking about: seat of consciousness, the generator of your reality. Not only does the brain critically evaluate every pain message it receives — considering it in context, checking it out like a piece of fruit at the grocery before deciding whether or not to buy it — it also sends messages downwards that affect the sensitivity and behaviour of nerve endings.8
Everything that hurts involves a conversation, a sort of debate, between the central and peripheral nervous system. It could be dramatized like this:
| NERVES | Got problems here! Bad problems! Red alert! |
| BRAIN | Yeah? Hmm. Okay, so noted. But you know what? I have access to information — sorry, it’s classified, you’ll just have to take my word for it — that suggests that we don’t have to worry about this much. |
| NERVES | I’m telling you, this is serious! |
| BRAIN | Nope, I don’t buy it. |
| NERVES | Look, I may not have access to this “information” you’re always talking about, but I know tissue damage, and I am not kidding around, this is a credible threat, and I am going to keep telling you about it. |
| BRAIN | Actually, you’re having trouble remembering what the problem is. You’re going to send me fewer messages for a while. Also, these aren’t the droids you’re looking for. |
| NERVES | Uh, right. What was I saying? Gosh, it seems like just a second ago I had something important to say, and it’s just gone. I’ll get back to you later I guess … |
The brain can boss nerves around, tell them how sensitive to be. When anxious, the brain might request “more information” from the peripheral nerves, ordering them to produce more signals in response to smaller stimuli. Or it might do exactly the opposite. In short, messages about pain don’t just go up to the brain, they go down. This two-way functionality in the pain system is the main difference between modern pain science and old-school pain science. But there’s more.
There is extensive recent evidence that the peripheral nerves can even physically, chemically change, perhaps in response to brain requests, tissue conditions, or both. To extend the analogy, this isn’t just twiddling the volume knob, but changing the equipment, changing the signal before it even gets to the “amplifier.”
More simply, and probably more importantly, we only feel what our brains allow us to feel. Even “loud” sensory messages can be filtered down to almost nothing by the central nervous system … or, conversely, “quiet” sensory messages can be amplified. The quality and intensity of the final experience is clearly the product of an elaborate set of neurological filters.
(Just for fun, have a look at the complex version of that diagram. SHOW )
Pain is less painful when we are confident that we are safe. This was demonstrated quite early in the history of pain research by a famous paper about wounded soldiers in WWII, which showed that they experienced surprisingly little pain considering the severity of their injuries — probably because they were so glad to be off the battlefield.9 Ever since, researchers have been trying to understand just how that actually works. Although many questions remain to be answered, we do seem to have a rough outline.
Perhaps many patients whom doctors treat as having a nerve injury or a disease have, instead, what might be called sensor syndromes. When your car’s dashboard warning light keeps telling you that there is an engine failure, but the mechanics can’t find anything wrong, the sensor itself may be the problem. This is no less true for human beings. Our sensations of pain, itch, nausea, and fatigue are normally protective. Unmoored from physical reality, however, they can become a nightmare … hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone suffer from conditions like chronic back pain, fibromyalgia, chronic pelvic pain, tinnitus, temporomandibular joint disorder, or repetitive strain injury, where, typically, no amount of imaging, nerve testing, or surgery manages to uncover an anatomical explanation. Doctors have persisted in treating these conditions as nerve or tissue problems—engine failures, as it were. We get under the hood and remove this, replace that, snip some wires. Yet still the sensor keeps going off.
So we get frustrated. “There’s nothing wrong,” we’ll insist. And, the next thing you know, we’re treating the driver instead of the problem.
Scratching an itch through the scalp to the brain, by Atul Gawande
Alas, no — pain neurology can’t be manipulated simply by wishing, or even by an elaborately cultivated good attitude. The brain may powerfully control how we experience potentially threatening stimuli, but I’m sorry to report that you do not control your brain. Consciousness and “mind” are by-products of brain function and physiological state. (Deep, eh?) It’s not your opinion of sensory signals that counts, it’s what your brain thinks of it — and that happens quite independently of consciousness and self-awareness. Many wise, calm, confident optimists still have chronic pain.
Humans don’t get to decide what they find threatening, stressful or painful any more than a cat does. That decision is left to ancient unconscious systems that can’t really be reasoned with.
Todd Hargrove, Treat Your Client Like a Wild Animal
Your brain will also modulate pain experience based on a number of other things that are completely out of your control, or rather difficult to control, or even just impractical to control. For instance, if you view a painful hand through a magnifying glass, it will actually get more swollen and inflamed — that is, if you make it look bigger, it will get bigger.10 And the reverse is true! Use optics to make it look smaller, and swelling will go down. Incredible, right? Jedi pain tricks! But … do you have a de-magnifying glass handy? Where do you buy even one of those, let alone a big one? (They really aren’t easy to find.) And what happens if the pain isn’t in a place that’s so easy to de-magnify, like your low back?
Although dang interesting, the de-magnification trick is not a practical approach. (How about looking backwards through binoculars?11) The effect is real under the right circumstances, but trying to use it as a treatment is like trying to take a magician’s trick home with you.
Although it is technically the brain’s prerogative to ignore painful signals from your tissues, that doesn’t mean that it will — if there is a destructive disease process going on, for instance, the brain will usually not ignore those signals! The pain system evolved to report problems, and it will diligently do so.
But that doesn’t mean that we’re powerless! Mind has some influence over brain. Below I suggest some ways that you can “hack” pain neurology.
At the beginning of the article, I shared this lovely Australian video about chronic pain. Its main messages are mission critical stuff, and overall it gets an A-grade from me. But I am concerned that some of its advice is a little too trite and dumbed down. While it’s certainly extremely important to emphasize the psychology of pain, this video comes dangerously close to saying (or sound like it is saying) “don’t worry, be happy” and the dreaded “all in your head” — and that’s really not what we want.
The psychology of pain must not be simplified so much that people have no idea what to do with it or, worse, feel blamed for it. This is tricky! “There’s fun stuff in pain science and neuroimmunology that’s slippery to adapt to practice without reaching too far” (Sandy Hilton, Physical Therapist, ChangeYourPain.com).
Another weakness is that the video portrays pain as a problem with a dysfunctional brain that can be “retrained,” which is definitely too optimistic. Brains are not terriers. Although it makes sense to try, there is no good evidence that it actually works, and it is virtually certain that it often does not. There are many possible reasons why.
For instance, stressors and mood disorders can be virtually invincible. Most people with chronic pain aren’t just a little stressed, they are a lot stressed, and often by major life challenges and social problems that they literally cannot solve. For instance, it is next to impossible for impoverished single mothers of children with serious health problems and inadequate social services to support them to meaningfully “reduce stress,” and advising them to do so borders on insultingly naive paternalism. In any event, most people find it extremely difficult to troubleshoot their own mental health Most people find it extremely difficult to troubleshoot their own mental health., even when their problems are theoretically more manageable. So while it’s correct to tell patients to “learn to reduce stress” and “consider how your thoughts and emotions are affecting your nervous system,” that advice is simply impractical without more and better information. “Consider” is just not concrete enough.
The video’s low point is a recommendation to “recognize deeper emotions” — even more impractical, to the point where many patients will dismiss it as a flaky talk, far too touchy-feely. I understand what the authors were going for, and it is the tip of an iceberg of an important concept — healing by “growing up” — that I will discuss below, but the video simplifies it to the point of absurdity.
I certainly applaud the emphasis on psychological and social factors, but it’s also really important to keep it real and make it practical …
How do we convince people in pain that we understand that they are in pain but it’s not just about the tissues of their body? A key conceptual shift that we think is really important is that you can understand that pain is the end result, pain is an output of the brain, designed to protect you … it’s not something that comes from your tissues.
Lorimer Moseley, from his surprisingly funny TED talk, Why Things Hurt
14:33
Pain is “another *%$@!! growth opportunity” — another reason to mature as a person, and a particularly good one. For many people with severe and chronic pain, learning coping skills are a necessity. But personal growth may provide an even greater opportunity than merely coping with pain. We may not control our brains, but we have do have considerable indirect leverage. We can’t micromanage every sensation, but we can tinker on a large scale. We change the context and direct our experience of life on a large scale. For instance …
Huff, puff, and blow your pain down. We can alter our physiology with deep, vigorous breathing, instantly creating new feelings — and your brain will go along for that ride, and perhaps re-interpret your experience of pain. See The Art of Bioenergetic Breathing.
Create new social contexts by doing something as simple as playing a team sport — because other people are counting on you, the painful consequences of intense exercise are usually re-contexualized as tolerable, even desirable, and you can put up with quite a lot more. You can’t think your way to that kind of pain tolerance — but you can place yourself in a situation where it is a likely outcome. This is why Haven puts on experiential workshops: to thoroughly “tinker” with your context, especially your social context, because humans beings are so interested in each other that our social experiences utterly dominate our consciousness. Change your social experience, change your brain!
Reduce fear and anxiety, increase confidence, especially with education. Fear and anxiety probably have more power to aggravate pain than any other emotional state, and acquiring knowledge and perspective are superb treatments. A confident and happy brain amplifies pain signals less than an anxious, miserable brain. This explains lots of interesting results in pain research (not to mention clinical observations), such as the fact that the most powerful factor predicting how soon people return to work after an episode of low back pain is whether or not they expect to return to work,12 or the fact that education alone probably helps to resolve neck pain.1314 So do not let health professionals scare you. Seek out as much information as you can find, because nothing causes more anxiety than uncertainty. These are real defenses against pain.
Early intervention is critical to prevent acute pain from turning into chronic pain.15 It is clear that chronic pain involves significant neurological changes, both in nerves and in how pain is processed in the brain. Once those changes occur, recovery is much more difficult, at an incredible cost in suffering and medical expense. Persistent pain should not be ignored. Deal with it sooner, not later.
The brain cells that produce pain get better and better at producing pain. They become more and more sensitive…
Lorimer Moseley, pain researcher, Why Things Hurt
Respect opiates — but don’t be afraid of them. All of this suggests that a more enlightened, progressive approach to medicating pain is also required.16 Patients and doctors alike shy away from the powerful pain medications for fear of their addictive properties. Due to simplistic, obsolete views of how pain works, a widespread attitude that pain should be tolerated instead of treated, and a fear of drug addiction that verges on the hysterical — and is irrelevant to rational, medical treatment of serious pain — countless people are deprived of medication that could not only relieve enormous suffering, but actually serve to treat serious chronic pain conditions by helping to interrupt the vicious cycle of fear and pain.
Firmly reject the self-hating idea that your pain is “just” psychological — another useful context-tweak. Paradoxically, even though pain is strongly regulated by your CNS, it is certainly not “all in your head.” The idea has always always been been disrespectful to pain patients, but now it is also scientifically obsolete and can be thrown out with yesterday’s trash. Any health professional talking like that should just be ignored. We know better: if you believe that you have a problem, you will definitely have one.
Be kind to your nervous system. Create pleasant, safe sensory experiences — positive inputs. Seek comfort. Be a hedonist. If your brain thinks you’re safe, pain goes down — and pleasure feels safe. So be “nice” to your CNS in every way that you can think of. Make your life — or a joint — feel safer, gentler, more pleasant. Do it in general ways (soak the whole system in a hot tub), but also more specifically: pleasantly stroke a sore knee, give a screaming shoulder the “comfort” of a sling for a while, or cautiously but thoroughly move a troubled joint to demonstrate to your brain that it’s okay. (See, brain? We can do this! No big deal!)
Finally, fix the fixable — and be honest about what is fixable. Most people aren’t quite as stuck as they think they are. Some problems really aren’t fixable, but a lot of your worst and oldest problems probably are, and they are the source of most stress, anxiety and depression — which means that they also have a direct impact on how much you hurt. There are many examples of difficult problems that can usually be fixed with some hard work and maybe some leaps of faith: bad marriages and toxic friendships, bad jobs and bad bosses, a house or city or climate you don’t like, poverty, addiction, insomnia and many more. Finally taking action to fix such problems is the most direct route to easing your brain’s interpretations of pain.
Change something — almost anything! — about how a painful area feels. Make it as feel different as you (cheaply) can. Sensation is one of the factors the brain uses to set pain levels. If you can make a body part feel significantly different in any way, it may help (but especially if you can make it feel safe, protected, stabilized). In fact, this probably explains why many treatments for pain problems are popular and seem to help sometimes, despite being unreliable and generally minor.17 Classic examples: taping, bracing, strapping, splinting, salving, vibrating, heating, icing. Regardless of how they supposedly work — there are many overly complex explanations — most of these methods mostly just change how a body part feels.18 The benefit of novel sensory input is probably not much more profound than being distracted by a loud noise … but we can add it to the toolkit, with reasonable expectations. Use any cheap, convenient, creative method — there’s little reason not to.
Don’t dramatize your pain. This one needs a whole section…
“It feels like a jagged, flaming, poisoned sword ripping through my body over and over again.”
People really talk like that. (My father talks like that. And I have the impulse — perhaps genetic — to talk like that.)
Beware of colourful and extreme descriptions of your pain. They are tempting. There are quite a few reasons to exaggerate pain. For instance, pain is such a private experience, so often minimized or even denied by health professionals, that patients are often tempted to dramatize the pain to make it seem more real. But it’s a trap! Before you know it, you’ll believe your own story. When you exaggerate and dramatize your pain, you directly exacerbate the neurological end of the chronic pain problem.
The pain scale is the imperfect replacement for flaming, poisoned swords. If you have chronic pain, you’ve probably been asked many times to rate your pain, and probably on a scale of 1 to 10, and maybe with a visual aid like this:
A typical doctor’s office pain scale chart.
A typical doctor’s office pain scale chart.
On the one hand, the pain scale is an essential pain research and clinical tool, with proven value — it’s the main way that we measure the effect of therapies, to see if they really work. On the other hand, the opportunities for abusing the pain scale are legion, and the pain scale is a source of perpetual confusion in health care offices throughout the land. It sounds so easy: just rate your dang pain! But people are often stumped by the question, or they overthink it, or they wildly exaggerate.
Many times I have seen pain-scale discussions nose dive into philosophy. Is #10 reserved for the worst pain we have ever experienced, or the worst pain we can imagine? “I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit.” Can we ever really know what someone else’s pain feels like? (No.) If pain fluctuates, do we take the average? For really horrible pain do we go off the scale? Or recalibrate?
The thing is, people like to go off the scale. Drama is fun. Hyperbole is fun.
“Definitely a 15. Having a baby, yikes, that was like a 19 with spikes to 38.”
The irony is that the pain scale is supposed to help you think more objectively and rationally about your pain, but it often just creates another opportunity for melodrama. So use the pain scale, but use it wisely. Use it as a tool for getting a little more real about your pain.
Speaking of hyperbole, this pain scale business was hilariously lampooned by Allie Brosh of the brilliant, scribbly blog Hyperbole and a Half. Look back at #8 on the pain scale chart above. Does that look like a #8? According to Brosh, #8 seems to be thinking: “The ice cream I bought barely has any cookie dough chunks in it. This is not what I expected and I am disappointed.” So she did her own. Here’s her take on #8:
“I am experiencing a disturbing amount of pain. I might actually be dying. Please help.”
“I am experiencing a disturbing amount of pain. I might actually be dying. Please help.”
Now that’s more like it! No ambiguity there! Brosh’s pain scale is so funny that you will spray milk out your nose. (Assuming you drink some milk first.) Read the whole thing. But get the joke!
I’ll keep this simple. Physical therapists, massage therapists, chiropractors and anyone who works with hurting bodies: please consider not trying to “fix” patient’s flesh. It’s possible that it’s impossible.19
Instead, address the nervous system. Just help patients remember what it’s like to feel safe and good. Be the source of a positive sensory experience. Educate to reassure, and avoid giving patients the slightest cause for alarm or worry.
I had corrective eye surgery a month ago. Today my eyesight gave me good insight into how pain works. The laboratory of my own body has yielded results yet again. I swear, I should just start injuring myself and having surgeries just for the academic experience. (Hm, on second thought, no. But you know what I mean.)
Recovery is going swimmingly. My left eye is so good it’s practically bionic now. My optometrist — an excellent one in downtown Vancouver,infoDr. Graham Foster, Performance Vision Optometry, downtown Vancouver. who loves eye-science tangents — basically can’t find any sign that anything even happened to my left eye. No laser tracks. No remaining signs of recovery. It’s done!
The right eye? Total slacker.
The left eye is so good that the right eye actually feels bad. It aches a bit. In reality, the right is also healing well and is either on recovery schedule or slightly ahead.
And yet my bionic left eye is so far ahead of healing schedule that the right actually literally suffers by comparison. It seems awfully blurry, and there has been mild pain for a couple weeks now, and this was freaking me out a little. Get a load of what my optometrist said (paraphrasing) when I told him about this:
People’s eyes often hurt when they think there’s something wrong with them.
Really? So … I should probably resist this punning, but I just can’t …
So, if you think there’s something wrong with your eyes, they may well start to hurt. This demonstrates that “pain is an opinion” rather well. That is, pain intensity depends surprisingly heavily on how dangerous/scary/disturbing the situation seem to us, on our “opinion of the state of the organism.” If you think the organism (you) is safe, pain will be dulled. If you think you’re in danger, then pain will be more painful.
This is clearly not the same thing as being “all in the head.” It’s pain being affected — dialed up or down — by what’s in the head, both consciously and unconsciously.
My optometrist described the following scenario (paraphrasing):
Someone can “discover” an eye problem they’ve had for twenty years and start hurting. They accidentally cover one eye while watching television, happen to notice that the vision in the free eye is a bit off. It’s been off all along — almost everyone is at least a wee bit astigmatic, but the brain completely takes care of that when both eyes are open. But if they notice it with an eye covered, a week later they’re in my office complaining of blurred vision and an ache.
Fascinating. And exactly like the mind game in low back pain. As with back trouble, I reckon that the idea of eye trouble is just a bit more freaky, and thus usually more sensitive to psychological factors.
Not only is worry generally excessive and unnecessary, we can see here that it is actually counter-productive and painful. (Which is worrying!) It’s really quite a thing: here I was getting anxious about my right eye when it’s only problem was being less awesome than my left. Good grief.
Honestly, I really became a little obssessed with it in the last couple weeks. I “discovered” that it wasn’t as good as the left, and started checking it constantly.
And so it started to ache.
I am impressed again by how easily I am fooled by the illusions of neurology, even when I am well aware of them. It is becoming clear to me — if I look at it with my left eye, anyway — that we need to know the basics of pain neurology quite well indeed in order to acquire the confidence required to see through those illusions. I was able to quickly focus on the nature of the problem when it was explained to me … but despite all my knowledge about musculoskeletal problems, I was blind to it without a bit of help.
Wednesday, July 4, 2012 — Added reference to Moseley, about the validity of explaining why pain education is therapeutic.
Wednesday, 9 May, 2012 — Added references to and quotes from Atul Gawande’s excellent article, Scratching an itch through the scalp to the brain.
Friday, November 25, 2011 — Added Lorimer Moseley’s superb TED talk about pain, Why Things Hurt 14:33, and a couple of good quotes from it.
Friday, August 26, 2011 — Added terrific story about pain without injury: the man with the nail in his boot.
Thursday, June 23, 2011 — Added interesting little item about how even microscopic organisms have complex pain experiences that vary with the circumstances.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011 — Substantial new appendix, providing a great example from life: eye pain rather obviously amped up by worry. Chock full of puns. Enjoy!
Thursday, December 2, 2010 — More practical advice in the form of a large new section at the end, “Don’t be a pain drama queen.”
Tuesday, August 24, 2010 — Added references to an excellent article by Moseley.
Friday, May 7, 2010 — Updated references related to mirror therapy, added some perspective about “mind over matter,” and re-wrote and upgraded the practical recommendations in the final section.
Why Things Hurt on YouTube.com.. A genuinely funny and entertaining TED talk about a snake bite and pain neurology. No, really, you will actually laugh — it’s like stand-up comedy. A must-watch for anyone with chronic pain, and the professionals who care for them. Understanding Pain and what to do about it in less than five minutes on YouTube.com.. Beautifully produced short video that neatly summarizes most of the key points in this article.I do have a few quibbles with the treatment advice provided, discussed above.
Marni Jackson’s book is the perfect book for thoughtful, liberal, middle-aged women in pain who will probably thoroughly enjoy Jackon’s style. Others may find it frustrating, overtly poetical and coquettish, neither rigorous enough for the science-minded, nor explanatory enough for the layperson seeking real understanding of either “the science or the culture of why we hurt.” Nevertheless, it is one of the most accessible and modern surveys of pain science available to readers right now. Like SaveYourself.ca, this book offers an unusual combination of both humour and information about pain. Kamen is a completely engaging writer, and tells her story with both journalist rigour and personality. BACK TO TEXTBACK TO TEXTDespite widespread support of mirror therapy for pain relief in the peer-reviewed, clinical and popular literature, the overwhelming majority of positive data comes from anecdotal reports, which constitute weak evidence at best. Only two well described and robust trials of mirror therapy in isolation exist, on the basis of which we conclude that mirror therapy per se, is probably no better than motor imagery for immediate pain relief, although it is arguably more interesting and might be helpful if used regularly over an extended period. Three high quality trials indicate positive results for a motor imagery program that incorporates mirror therapy, but the role of mirror therapy in the overall effects is not known. Obviously, more robust clinical trials and experimental investigations are still required. In the meantime, the relative dominance of visual input over somatosensory input suggests that mirrors might have utility in pain management and rehabilitation via multisensory interactions. Indeed, mirrors may still have their place in pain practice, but we should be open-minded as to exactly how.
BACK TO TEXT BACK TO TEXTBACK TO TEXTThe feeling that our body is ours, and is constantly there, is a fundamental aspect of self-awareness. Although it is often taken for granted, our physical self-awareness, or body image, is disrupted in many clinical conditions. One common disturbance of body image, in which one limb feels bigger than it really is, can also be induced in healthy volunteers by using local anaesthesia or cutaneous stimulation. Here we report that, in patients with chronic hand pain, magnifying their view of their own limb during movement significantly increases the pain and swelling evoked by movement. By contrast, minifying their view of the limb significantly decreases the pain and swelling evoked by movement. These results show a top-down effect of body image on body tissues, thus demonstrating that the link between body image and the tissues is bi-directional.
This study identified factors affecting return-to-work time after an episode of low-back pain. From the abstract: “The key psychosocial predictors identified were expectations of recovery and perception of health change.”
BACK TO TEXT This is one of a few studies showing a benefit to education for neck pain. The researchers showed a reassuring educational video to more than 200 patients with “whiplash associated disorders” (i.e. whiplash injuries that become chronic neck cricks), and found that they had less severe symptoms than about the same number of patients who received no educational intervention. The effectiveness of education probably depends a lot on the type of neck pain and the type of education, making it very hard to study. A recent review of the scientific literature found that most such studies are negative, but I believe that there are many reasons to be optimistic about education for pain problems: see Haines for more information.
BACK TO TEXTWe know that “explaining pain” seems to reduce it, but how? Do we really know what’s going on? “The theory behind explaining pain is that it decreases pain by changing the underlying schema about what pain actually is.” Dr. Moseley methodically applies a validity test to that theory, which it passes with flying colours, meaning that it is a reasonable, working theory about how pain education works (not proof that is does work — a technical but important difference).
For contrast, note that in a follow-up article, he concludes that graded motor imagery does not satisfy the burns test — a nice demonstration of the integrity of his reasoning.
BACK TO TEXT BACK TO TEXTA standout chapter in an otherwise only average book, Jackson thoroughly reports on the case of Dr. Frank Adams, a credible and earnest American physician who moved to Canada in the hopes of finding a more enlightened political environment for the treatment of pain ... only to find his new home just as problematic as his old one. A fascinating look at our culture’s puritancial, head-in-the-sand attitude towards narcotics.
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