Pain Management Methods

Whereas nearly everyone recognizes that chronic pain is a sign of "something wrong", modern medical science has little to offer for certain kinds of pain - notably musculo-skeletal pain and headaches. Medical science thinks almost entirely in terms of intervention - either surgical or chemical (drugs); it overlooks the body's natural self-regulating mechanisms, which sometimes go awry and cause the pain to begin with -- two examples being headaches and back pain..

This potential to change how ones body functions has to do with conditioning. Muscles go into contraction during pain and stress. This state of contraction cannot effectively be controlled by drugs or countered by surgery because it has to do with a brain-level reaction: habituated reflexes that keep muscles contracted as if the painful incident is still occurring.

Once this kind of reaction pattern forms, as during prolonged periods of healing, it tends to persist, sometimes for decades, unless and until the person does something deliberate to change them; these tensions do not "heal" because there is no damage. The neuromuscular system is functioning quite well, but in an aberrated way!

It is for that reason that chemical and physical interventions are ineffective: the person does not have a medical problem; they have a conditioning problem.

As much as fifty-percent of all chronic pain comes from a common cause: chronically tight muscles. None of the approaches named above frees chronically tight muscles. However, an effective alternative exists, new and radically different from conventional approaches, and so effective that it can dramatically lower the costs of health care and lost productivity.

Let's be more specific: How can tight muscles create pain?

Ever lifted something heavy for more than a few seconds? Don't your muscles start to burn? Imagine what muscles must feel like when contracted 24 hours a day! And more: consider what tight muscles cause in the joints they cross: compression. Might not relentless compression cause joint pain? What about nerves trapped between tight muscles and bone: ever had a pinched nerve?

That mechanism accounts for a long list of familiar complaints: back pain, muscular pain, headaches, scoliosis, TMJ, carpal tunnel syndrome (in many cases), tennis elbow (medial epicondylitis), knee pain, foot pain, and certain other conditions.

Next question: What is the universal response to shock or injury? When you get hurt what's the first thing that happens. You tighten up, don't you?

Might that not explain the "pains and stiffness of aging"? -- more opportunities for shock and/or injury as time passes?

Because of the recognized hazards of drug dependency, physicians are sometimes reluctant to prescribe even painkilling drugs and prefer to tell the patient to get used to the pain.

In extreme cases, however, the neurosurgeon steps in and cuts nerves, or the orthopedist replaces a joint (sometimes necessary and successful at alleviating pain, sometimes, not). Cortisone may be injected to reduce inflammation or botulism toxin injected to paralyze muscles. These kinds of measures often miss the point: the person is in pain because they are too tight; joints degenerated because of too much muscle-induced pressure; and muscles are too tight because the brain has become conditioned to hold them that way.

In that case, answer is not surgery or drugs; it is to change the conditioning by which a person holds themselves too tight -- a process that falls more into the realm of learning than of medical intervention.

You should recognize the significance of the fact that pain management is generally considered a sub-specialty of anaesthesiology. Anaesthesiology doesn't deal with causal conditions; it deals with effects. For those who were looking for information on TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation), new drugs, nerve ablation surgeries, or a general monograph on contemporary methods of pain management, this article is likely to have altered your perspective.

That said, let's return the the central point of this article: most chronic pain conditions trace back to reflexive muscular tensions maintained by brain conditioning.

To change the tension level of muscles requires more than stretching or massaging; it requires a learning process that affects the brain, which controls the muscular system. Such a learning process is referred to in some circles as "somatic education". Somatic education systematically uses special movement training techniques to improve awareness and control of the muscular system. Significant results come relatively quickly, and when they do, the benefits are second nature and require no special attention in daily life, other than a brief, morning-refreshment routine to purge out the accumulated effects of daily stresses.

A system of sensory awareness and movement education (brain training), Hanna Somatic Education®, has been developed that restores freedom from numerous forms of musculo-skeletal and stress related pain.

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