Better Thinking About Chronic Back Pain Cures

In the last few decades millions of people have suffered with back pain.

For some, it is an acute attack of pain, which resolves over time. For others, the pain becomes chronic. Chronic pain is usually defined as pain that lasts from three to six months. For many back pain sufferers there is no relief. Not a day, not an hour and not a minute goes by all year when they are not in some way incapacitated either by the actual pain or the fear of the pain returning.

These sufferers find their world getting smaller and smaller, as the activities they used to do fade into their more healthful past.

The Treatments are Many

The first experience with back pain can be mild or it can be utterly disabling;involving the electric shooting pain of sciatica in the legs and restricted arm and leg movements. Hands problems and neck pain can be present too, depending on the alleged source of the problem, which may be in the cervical, thoracic or lumbar spine.

When the pain or problem has lasted long enough or is severe, victims often seek help.

This is often where the trouble and the misdiagnosis begins.

The most popular forms of treatment are:

• Physical Therapy
• Chiropractic Adjustments
• Acupuncture
• Pain medication and muscle relaxnts
• Cortisone shots in muscles
• Epidural Shots
• Surgery

Many times these treatments and medications will have a temporary curative effect, but all will cost money and some, such as medications and shots and surgery, can be dangerous and life threatening.

The relief is sweet while it lasts, but what does a person do when the pain comes back and all methods of treatment, including surgery, fail to relieve the pain?

Better Thinking

What do you do when the doctors and the therapists throw up their hands and tell you to "live with the pain"?

Often this will cause a sufferer to spiral into depression. Here you are, often very young, even in your teens, and you are told by those who are trained in medicine that you will have to live in pain for the rest of your life. Thoughts start to turn dark, even suicidal.

Instead of resigning to a life of pain, many have found permanent relief through changing their thinking.

They begin a journey that starts with the idea that many chronic and unexplained pain and problems are caused by emotions.

This is not a new idea, as we shall see. The ancient Greeks understood that many illnesses were caused or worsened by emotions.

Until about seventy years ago, medicine was actively exploring the idea of a mind-body connection for many illnesses. However, the rapid gains in science, such as the MRI and CAT scan, along with the narrowing speciality fields of many doctors, has led to many false paths when it comes to diagnosing back pain, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, costochondritis, non-athlete repetitive stress injuries, carpel tunnel syndrome, and many other maladies.

The practice of medicine evolved into one where most specialists were well-schooled in looking for their specialty area when trying to diagnose a problem that was not obvious.

This has sent patients all over the globe bouncing from one specialist to another when a certain cause is not found. If a cause is not found, the patient ends up referred to a chiropractor, a naturopath, an acupuncturist or similar "alternative" treatment.

There the symptoms are treated some more. Usually the results are the same. The pain remains or the pain returns.

It is the rare medical practitioner who will sit down with a patient and ask them not only about what is physically bothering them, but also about what is going on in their lives.

This is where the better thinking about chronic pain begins. Many times the start of a chronic pain problem can be traced back to on-going or recently finished stressful events in life, such as a death or a divorce or a job loss, or any combination of things.

Better thinking about chronic pain is being done more and more, because there is an epidemic of chronic pain in the United States and the Western World.

The important thing to remember about the pain is that it is real. This pain is not simply conjured in your head; you are not imaging it. Subtle physilogical changes happen when emotions effect the body. The still popular notion in the medical community is that emotions and stress and anxiety can influence the severity of the pain, but not really cause it. The minority insists that the brain can and does cause physical problems. Ongoing scientific study is beginning to confirm the minority view.

The following medical practitioners and authors have laid the groundwork and continued the idea that how you think effects how you feel.

John E. Sarno MD -- Back Pain

The wayback machine only needs to go to the 1990's to take a look at the work of Dr. John E. Sarno, MD. Dr. Sarno is in practice at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation in New York, NY. He has been working with people with back pain and chronic pain since 1950. After awhile, he became disatisfied with the results of the traditional back rehabilition metods, because of the high failure rate, and reasoned, based on his own experience, and the close examination of patients, that many of them were quit anxious and stressed. When he began suggesting that stress might be the cause of the back pain, he found that his "cure" rate went up. He termed the problem Tension Myosidis Symdrome or TMS. The cure was not exercise or rest or traction or surgery: the cure was knowledge. Understand that anxiety and stress and -- in some cases-- deeply felt fearful emotions are the cause, and you can think yourself to a cure. A couple main lessons of Dr. Sarno's are that fear of the symptoms will perpetuate the symptoms; and that it is the action of doing something, say standing in line for a long time, that triggers the pain -- and not the other way around. Conditioning will cause pain. Like Pavlov's famous dogs, if you unconsciously or consciously think that you will feel pain when standing, you will.

One famous television personality, John Stossel, suffered with back pain for years, until he visited Dr. Sarno. The video explains his cure and also reports on another high profile person's cure. Radio personality Howard Stern dedicated his first book to Dr. Sarno as well, for giving him his life back after many years of back pin.

Sarno is still in practice at the Rusk Rehabilitation Institute in New York City.

Dr. Sarno books on back and chronic pain are: Healing Back Pain and The Mind-Body Prescription.

Dr. Claire Weekes

Dr. Weekes suffered from anxiety herself. Here we travel further back in time than Dr. Sarno. We go back to the 1960's and 70's. Dr. Weekes wrote about how anxiety will effect your mind and your body. In her work, Dr. Weekes offers that it is "sensitization, bewilderment and fear" that leads to a loop of fear and anxiety and more fear.

The autonomic nervous system, which controls the unconscious functions in every human, will respond to all stimuli. It can be a pleasurable response, or it can be a fearful response, based on the situation. When something frightens a person, even if it is a strange bodily sensation, fear is created, a primal "flight or flight" conditioning, which can lead to all sorts of bodily symptoms, from dizzyness to feelings of unreality to back pain to headaches. If a victim of anxiety does not know that it is anxiety, what Dr. Weekes calls the "Second Fear" takes over. The First Fear is the sensation itself, and the Second Fear is the questioning, the "What if I have something horrible" thinking. Or the "What if it never goes away", thinking.

Dr. Weekes helps you where Dr. Sarno leaves off. Dr. Sarno's addition to the litrature and understanding of anxiety and stress is important in that he examines the late 20th Century epidemic of back problems that are "proven" by MRI and CAT scans, and advises well on how to regard what the readings mean (usually nothing), and he outlines the strength of the spine. Dr. Weekes will instruct you how to cure your anxiety. Her messages is to accept the anxiety (substitute pain when necessary in her books), float through it and basically understand that it is a normal human reaction.

Dr. Weekes wrote Hope and Help For Your Nerves. She also has a set of CD recordings, which, I believe, are more effective than the book. Here you can hear her common sense Aussie voice, telling you much like your grandmother might, that one "shouldn't worry", that the strange bodily sensations are nothing new under the sun.

Abraham Low, MD

Doctor Abraham Low founded Recovery International, in 1937, an organization that helps people overcome anxiety and depression symptoms, which can range from panic attacks to severe physical problems.

In some ways, Recovery International., is similar to Alcoholics Anynonomous (AA), with its own steps to progress, its own language and a mentoring program. Like AA, regular group meetings are held and follow a formula that is discussed in Low's seminal work, Mental Health Through Will Training, published 1950.

Despite an akward title, Low's book describes many people who were suffering from various physical maladies and that found relief through Low's mental (not physical) techniques.

One of the main themes in Mental Health Through Will Training, is that, once a malady is discovered to be "benign" (that there is no structural or pathological cause for the pain and discomfort), that the person, with support through Recovery International and personal support, can find the "will to bear the discomfort". Once that is done, because the discomfort bearing is mental work, and not physical, then the body will return to normal.

Recovery International, has locations worldwide, with many in the United States.

Dale Carnegie

Sometimes Carnegie is better known for another bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and less known for How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. It is the latter book, though, that may prove to be more important in the long run of 21 Century illnesses. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living was published in the 1940's.

Carnegie brings a layman's knowledge to the problem of "nervous illnesses", and with practical Missouri-heritage sense, Carnegie uses that same knowledge to help millions, through his book, to recover and get on with living the life they want.

What You Think-- You Are

This thinking applies especially to some chronic and hard to diagnose illnesses and pain, such as most back pain, fibromyalgia, carpel tunnel syndrome and many types of maladies.

If you are told by a doctor or, increasingly, by the internet, that you have a hopeless condition and to live with it, your most likely to think along those lines and lose out on so much of what you used to enjoy.

These authors are not a substitute for medical advice, but offer an alternative to your thinking. It is only after you have been checked by your doctor and told that you have nothing structural or internally wrong with you, that you should begin to think different about the cloudy diagnosis that you have received.

To think different often is not easy;it is a journey. If you have suffered chronic stress and anxiety or troubled emotionally, it may take you some time (and therapy) to unwind it all.

This is not medical advice, but only information on how to think different about the physical symptoms you may be having. I am not a doctor, but I've been down the road.