[curun1r]

The problem with viewing pain the way you're viewing it is that pain is an entirely subjective concept and there's no way to objectively measure it. Looking for physiological symptoms, like serotonin imbalances, can never adequately explain the perception of pain because there's no way to tell the difference between a symptom and a cause.

I've seen through meditation how simply learning to experience pain in a more productive fashion eliminates the vast majority of it. So much of the pain that I used to experience was the result of feeling a small amount of physical pain and my mind blowing it completely out of proportion. Learning to experience pain with equanimity rather than distress causes pain to recede into the background.

In addition to using disciplined thinking to control pain, I've also used it to increase the amount of time I can hold my breath from just over a minute to over six minutes. Like pain, the urge to breath is a little bit physical and a lot mental. Learning to experience it with calmness and acceptance dramatically reduced its power.

The tendency of modern medicine to look for a pill to cure everything is very dangerous when the problem you're dealing with cannot be objectively measured. The mind is a very powerful thing and it's measurements will always be at least partially the result of the patient's thought processes...there's no way to separate them. And with all the negative consequences of these drugs (both painkillers and drugs that target neurotransmitters have very serious side effects), there should be a lot more emphasis on patients exhausting all non-pharmaceutical approaches first.

[gforge]

I could not agree more. Our bodies have had millions of years of handling disease without drugs, we should tap into that resource. The problem I face daily is that many patients come to me and say they don't have the time for physiotherapy and want surgery. They often add that their neighbor had great experience with surgery for the exact same illness. It's actually amazing how illnesses cluster...

It is hard to convince people of taking the slow route. This is a similar to convincing people to write unit tests for their code, we understand that it is the right thing to do but we always have a deadline. Some threads here report that they started with physiotherapy after years of other solutions, I would love to know how to change years into months.

[edison85]

I feel like most chronic issues have to be viewed systematically. Often an injury or imbalance in one area over time causes dysfunction in another and although we have physiatrists, they jus don't have enough time to look at the body as a whole and PTs have the time but many just go through the motions.

For chronic pain, I've given the book Trigger Point Workbook by Davies which makes Travell and Simon's trigger point research easily understood by the layman tona few people and many have improved over time. I've seen carpel tunnel, back pain, scoliosis, SI dysfunction, TMJ all improve