One of the biggest things with chronic pain that is not looked at enough is autonomic nervous system dysregulation. This means the fight or flight stressed out sympathetic nervous system is usually in overdrive while the rest and digest relaxed parasympathetic nervous system is not active enough. In laymen’s terms, the person is under stress. […]
New paper just out looking at fear and its relationship to pain. Fear is the fuel for continued pain. Many times when we can cut out the fuel source we can cut out the pain. One of the keys is to learn to expose yourself to what you fear and to stop avoiding things because […]
Wanted to share two review studies that really show why I target the brain directly when treating chronic conditions- in this case Osteoarthritis. Both articles here are systematic review studies, which pool data from multiple studies to get a better idea of the overall impact of certain treatment effects. What we are looking at in […]
This new study really supports the approach I have here at The Pain PT- which is targeting the brain and nervous system for chronic pain relief. One of the biggest things I talk about is getting the limbic system (emotional brain) to settle down. In particular, the biggest thing I see in my patients are […]
One of the things I teach with people in chronic pain is forgiveness- of others, of past hurts, and most importantly yourself and your symptoms. We have research showing how forgiveness leads to positive health effects. Here is a blurb below from an article at Johns Hopkins Medicine talking about forgiveness. “There is an enormous […]
One of the principles I use with treating chronic pain is exposure therapy. This involves doing the very things that cause pain. If we can learn to do these things from a different mental perspective (move from it’s damaging to it’s not harmful), we can retrain the brain’s response to a trigger. In this study, […]
Self-efficacy is your belief in your own abilities to deal with various situations. Wanted to share a Journal of Pain 2018 review study that compiled data from 27 previous studies on self-efficacy and the prognosis of chronic musculoskeletal pain. We need more quality studies in this area but the results are in line with what […]
I see the Nocebo effect in so many of my chronic pain and chronic health patients. It’s not talked about as much as it should, even though we have solid research it plays a big part in health symptoms. The nocebo, as mentioned in the article below, is the “sibling with a dark side” to […]
I have never forgotten a quote I read years ago that said: ‘What you believe is what your life will be.’ I wanted to share this study from Stanford which shows how beliefs directly impact physiology. Just by telling people they had a certain gene for obesity or exercise tolerance (which was not true) caused […]
Nice summary in link below by Dr. Siegel from Harvard about the power of the placebo. What is the placebo: Your beliefs. With chronic pain that doesn’t go away, we know the brain has been shown to be a big part of persistent pain. When I work with chronic issues, one the first things I […]
