Are You Ready for a REVOLUTION in Pain Care?
June, 2016
Ready for a REVOLUTION in Pain Care?
I am! I have just completed my five month training to be a Certified Therapeutic Pain Specialist (certification pending a passing grade for my final project 🙂 ), and I’m on fire! What my therapists and I are already experiencing with our patients is that the new science of pain has given us the missing piece to help our patients significantly decrease and sometimes even resolve their long-term pain issues.
My team and I will be sharing pain stories and insights that we’re experiencing in our clinic. Our hope is to help as many other people as possible experience LESS PAIN and MORE LIFE!
A few pearls I’ve learned:
1. Pain is NORMAL: We have become a culture that tends to over-react to pain and rush to medications, x-rays and rest, when often all that is needed is a little time, consistent but safe movement and knowing that healing happens. The body is amazing in this way 😀 .
2. Acute pain (1-3+ months) can predict chronic pain (pain that lasts longer than 3-6 months). Manage the healing after injury well, and avoid the experience of pain for months or even years.
3. X-rays, images and other scans and tests only show a piece of the pain puzzle. Just because someone shows a bulging disc, arthritis, curves in their spine, shoulder or knee issues, does not always mean that is the only cause of pain. Studies show that 30-50% of people without pain will have x-rays and MRI’s that have “issues” that we usually believe should cause pain but don’t.
4. Our old bio-mechanical model of diagnosing and trying to “fix” pain is not as effective after the acute healing phase is over. Tissues HEAL – so what’s going on when the pain continues?
5. When fear of any kind (fear of the diagnosis, fear of finances, family issues, etc), is part of the pain picture, the nervous system can over-react to the pain and create more pain and sensitivity.
The program that has provided me the opportunity to delve deeper into the pain science is the International Spine and Pain Institute (ISPI). I was first introduced to their revolutionary way of viewing pain at an “Explain Pain” class in 2008 and have followed their work, writings and teachings ever since. There is a small group of teachers, therapists and researchers around the world that are complete pain-nerds. They look in every nook and cranny to review or create the research to help us all understand our bodies and our responses to pain better. To this end, they have created a system of working with people in pain that works!
The foundation of what we do to help people in pain starts with teaching them about pain and why their nervous system got so reactive and sensitive in the first place. For many it started with an injury or sudden back-strain. For others, it started gradually, as in many cases of fibromyalgia.
Stay tuned for upcoming information and classes to help support YOU, your friends and family in living an enjoyable life with less (or no) pain!
In Health,
Allison Suran