Back Pain Management Or Relief - Myths And Realities

by Christine Sutherland

DO YOU STILL HAVE BACK PAIN, EVEN THOUGH YOU’VE DONE EVERYTHING YOUR DOCTOR ASKED? HERE’S WHY IT DIDN’T WORK.

The Proof

Back pain, whether lower back pain or upper back pain, is the most common of all chronic pain complaints, and yet most people discover that their pain program is next to useless.

We waste over $12 billion on failed chronic pain programs here in Australia every year, and in the USA it is more than double that. If you add on the lost wages of the sufferer, and the cost in lost productivity to businesses, the costs run into many hundreds of billions of dollars, every year. It’s easy to imagine what this does to the health system, but of even more importance is the suffering of chronic pain patients and their families.

Almost everyone has experienced extreme pain at one time or another. But most of us never have to endure the relentless, everyday agony that back pain patients suffer, with every movement, sometimes even breathing, bringing yet more pain.

Current methods have failed to help back pain patients in the majority of cases and I hope that the methods described here will replace those ineffective methods. Australian research demonstrates that it’s now possible to bring immediate relief to the majority of people with back pain or neck main, with most of those achieving total elimination, regardless of how long they’ve suffered.

In the Australian research with long-term chronic pain patients with a history of at least 2 failed pain treatments, half the participants achieved a 100 per cent elimination of pain on the first treatment. Of the remainder, a majority enjoyed over 50 per cent reduction of their pain levels, and the results were permanent with one exception, a patient who, curiously, continued her high-velocity cervical spine manipulations even though her pain increased dramatically with each visit to her chiropractor.

The research is ongoing, with more information available on the web site.

This report should be useful in helping you to:

** Appreciate how the myths of chronic pain have led to serious mistakes in treatment programs, even by the most highly-trained health professionals.

** Finally discover a treatment method for back pain that is based on sound evidence, and which has a high probability of helping you.

The techniques outlined in this report do not in any way replace the need for thorough investigation and treatment of your back pain, or indeed any chronic pain. Rather, they are presented as a crucial part of your pain treatment, and also as a stepped alternative to more invasive treatment measures such as surgery, where such surgery is of significant risk.

So please never try to self diagnose any condition, especially pain, and never presume that if you’ve had the pain for many years, that the cause remains the same. Many people give up on their pain and stop seeing their doctor. We ask you to retain the supervision of your qualified medical specialist, and keep them informed of your progress through the program, should you decide to try it.

THE THEORY OF PAIN - HOW WE GOT IT WRONG

Scientists and medical professionals used to have some pretty strange ideas about pain, ideas that are embarrassing when we look at them in the light of up-to-date scientific knowledge! But even though we’ve made excellent advanced in the treatment of acute pain, in contrast the treatment of chronic pain is still in the dark ages in most cases, and it’s not surprising that most back pain patients are suffering far longer than necessary, if at all!

You see, we now know that acute pain and chronic pain are worlds apart in nature, and even use 2 different nerve paths, as I’ll shortly explain.

It is only very recently that this was clearly understood and better interventions have begun to be developed. (For a better understanding of the benefits and shortcomings of the variety of current chronic pain treatments, please download the more comprehensive report on the web site.)

The main area in which we “got it wrong” when it came to the treatment of chronic pain was that we did not (and most interventions still don’t) understand the crucial role played by seemingly non-physical factors such as the patient’s social, family, emotional, psychological, financial and occupational issues.

Now I’d like to describe exactly how these things produce chronic pain, and how you can stop worrying about “control” and just start eliminating it instead.

Through not understanding these factors, treatment was directed at the patient’s physical activity only, and the patient was (and often still is) told to “push through the pain” to complete excruciating exercise regimes, often causing the patient enormous physical and emotional distress.

Another areas where therapists have been incorrect is in the blaming of the patient for “bringing on the pain”, supposedly because the patient wasn’t “disciplined” enough in their thinking. Several current approaches still try to get the patient to change their internal voice using nothing but willpower!

Thoughts and attitudes certainly do help produce pain, but it’s an enormous mistake to assume that there is any significant conscious control over these. These things are mediated unconsciously, and we regard blaming the patient’s thinking or speech as both ignorant and cruel.

There is a far more intelligent, humane, and effective approach, and that is to address the emotional factors which underly the thoughts, attitudes and beliefs that are linked to pain production, and to eliminate those using modern de-conditioning techniques. Only King Canute would be silly enough to try to do that by willpower!

There is a third area where technology has shown up our misunderstanding of chronic pain, and this is brain imaging. The brain maps of chronic pain look just like the brain maps of emotional distress - very different to brain maps of acute pain.

It seems amazing to us that until now no-one has linked this with learning theory and memory studies. If they had, they would discover that the same processes which modulate conditioned responses and memory, also appear to modulate chronic pain.

But so far in the story of development of pain programs, misunderstanding and lack of informatioin has led to a mass of programs which have as their goal teaching the patient to “cope” with their pain, rather than actually relieving it.

And now it should be clear to you why analgesics, surgery, CBT, acupuncture, osteopathy, hypnotherapy, and chiropractic have all failed to deliver relief that is of any permanence or significant to people with unrelenting back pain.

A TREATMENT METHOD WHICH IS PROVEN TO WORK FOR BACK PAIN

There is now a whole easier, far more effective way to help people with chronic pain, which does not blame the patient for his thinking, which does not treat the patient as a body without a brain, and which accurately targets the real cause of your back pain, which is conditioned activity of the brain and nervous system.

In complete contrast to every other program, this chronic pain program has as its aim the complete elimination of your back pain. And it does that by working with the mechanisms which produce your pain signals, switching them off permanently so that they never recur.

This proven program is known as BMSA, or Brief, Multi-Sensory Activation therapy, and it has achieved outstanding results, even where back pain sufferers have had serious pain for many years, and even where the patient has tried and failed many other pain programs. Most people can learn to self treat very quickly and easily, and most people achieve some result from the very first treatment.

Australian clinical research over the past 6 years shows that we can expect around 95% of true chronic back pain patients to achieve either total elimination of their back pain, or dramatically reduce their back pain.

More information on this approach to treating chronic back pain is available from the web site, including some interesting case studies.

About the Author:

C Sutherland is a clinical researcher and a specialist in chronic back pain. More detailed info about why current programs usually fail, and what you can do about your back pain is freely available.