What are Causes of Chronic Pain?
Pain doesn’t always result from physical damage. In fact, studies reveal that many common “structural issues” like bulging discs or joint wear may not be the real cause of the pain people are experiencing. For example, 80% of people without pain have similar structural “abnormalities” that often get blamed for pain in others.
The journey to pain relief and emotional freedom centres around a deep understanding of the mind-body connection. Research increasingly shows that emotionally upsetting episodes or prolonged periods of stress can not only fuel but CAUSE chronic pain, fatigue, fibromyalgia, IBS, migraines, skin issues and more.
This is then further compounded by the daily stress of dealing with a chronic condition. You're told there is no cure and is likely to get worse leading to fear and frustration. Chronic stress has serious impacts on our bodies, resulting in nervous system dysregulation and symptoms such as pain and fatigue.
Over time, these physical changes can become programmed into you. Even if the emotional response stops, the physical response can still remain, leaving you with a chronic health problem.
Through Pain Coaching and Pain Reprocessing Therapy, we address the underlying root causes to regulate your nervous system and free you from patterns of discomfort so you can regain control.
This approach has been shown to be more effective than conventional treatments in follow-up studies that have been carried out:
- In one study, there were 150 chronic back pain patients. 50 patients received Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) twice a week for four weeks, 50 patients received treatment as usual, and 50 patients received an open-label placebo injection. In the PRT group, 98% of patients improved and 66% of patients were pain-free or nearly pain-free at the end of treatment. These outcomes were largely maintained one year later. In contrast, only 20% of people who received placebo injections and 10% of those receiving usual care reported similar improvements. (Ashar, Gordon, Schubiner et al, 2021).
- 21.9% of people with Fibromyalgia still had at least 50% reduction in symptoms 6 months after mind-body treatments (8.5% with CBT, 11.4% with education) (Lumley et al, 2017).
- At 6 months, 45.8% of Fibromyalgia sufferers had at least 30% pain reduction, and 20.8% had at least 50% pain reduction. 0% of the control group showed any improvement (Hsu et al. 2010).
Are you saying the pain is all in my head?
Absolutely NOT!
The debilitating symptoms experienced with any trauma, fatigue or pain condition are very real. They are not imagined or made up - in fact it has been proven that it is impossible to do so.
In conditions like Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, there is no pathological change to tissues such as destruction or breakdown so many physicians struggle to understand the causes of pain and how such crippling symptoms can be produced.
In conditions such as chronic back pain, although these are commonly attributed to 'abnormalities' like bulging discs or worn joints, astonishingly there is no evidence to support this. Various studies have shown that almost 80% of people without any pain also have these 'abnormalities', making them actually quite normal and not the cause of pain.
Although the concept of a mind body connection sounds new, evidence has been around for 50 years or so to support its mechanisms. A professor of Rehabilitation Medicine in the US, Dr John Sarno, became aware of this phenomenon in the 1970's and developed effective diagnostic and treatment principles for a condition he called Tension Myoneural Syndrome, or TMS for short. He used these principles for pain treatment of chronic pain conditions such as back pain, tendonitis, repetitive strain injury, migraines and pelvic pain. At this point he didn't understand why his patient's pain was linked to chronic stress, he just knew that it was.
With further advances in science, it is now understood that a chronic stress response results in our nervous system becoming dysregulated which has a wide-ranging impact on every system within our bodies and is involved in many health conditions. TMS is becoming a more widely recognised condition although these days it tends to stand for Tension Myositis Syndrome or The Mindbody Syndrome.
Unfortunately, few physicians are aware of TMS, the mind body approach or that nervous system dysregulation and unresolved emotions can be the cause of very real pain and fatigue. Modern medicine tends to be very reductionist, only looking at a specific area of the body and seeing illness as caused by a faulty physical body that must be mended. Hence, standard treatments are focused solely on symptom management rather than dealing with the real underlying cause of the problem.
Discover the 3 biggest barriers that are preventing your recovery... and what to do about them!
