|
|
|
|
|
|
by rajlego
958 days ago
|
|
|
Cannot understate how strongly I recommend reading about mind body syndrome for anyone with chronic pain. Decent summary:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BgBJqPv5ogsX4fLka/the-mind-b... the tl;dr of it is that a lot (probably even the majority of chronic pain) is psychological, not structural. This isn't obvious because the pain is in fact entirely real. What causes it though is that if you think there's something wrong/sense minor pain in your back, brain thinks 'oh no somethings wrong' and sends more pain - this reinforces your sense of something being wrong and makes the pain worse and stay. This normally doesn't happen that often but if you're stressed, you're much more sensitive to pain making it much easier to trigger. My story with chronic pain: I had bad RSI for 2-3 weeks. Went away over a weekend after I read a story [0] of how someone treated their RSI. Your thinking about pain influences you're brains perception of it - you can halt the brain pain amplification cognitively. For more detail on the nitty gritty of how this works neurologically, I recommend Unlearn Your Pain by Dr. Schubiner: https://www.amazon.com/Unlearn-Your-fourth-Howard-Schubiner-... [0] https://sjbyrnes.com/rsi.html |
|
|
The Way Out by Alan Gordon talks about this in more depth - one anecdote he mentions was a football player with REALLY bad back pain, who you'd expect to have all kinds of injuries, was pretty much completely fine after pain reprocessing therapy. This isn't an isolated case - I think the majority of people he tested PRT on in the Boulder Back Pain Study ended up getting significantly better via PRT implying most people didn't actually have structural issues
(note, exercise does still help because it's theorized that the way the body creates pain is by lowering blood flow/oxygen - exercise counters this. When my RSI was fairly bad, I remember that working out or sprinting and getting blood flowing would make me feel more or less ok)