Lower Back Pain - The 7 Essential Steps To Recovery
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Lower back pain is the single most common chronic pain, experienced by 60-80% of the population at some time in their lives. Even though many people can achieve healing through good physiotherapy or other treatment programs, roughly 20% of lower back pain sufferers never get relief.
These are the people who will almost certainly be helped by this article.
YOUR LOWER BACK PAIN - CHRONIC OR ACUTE?
Back pain can be considered to be "chronic pain" when it persists over a long time without improvement, despite following treatment recommendations. The fascinating thing about chronic pain is that it has little or nothing to do with actual damage or injury.
Using x-rays of spinal damage, studies show that it's impossible to predict who will experience pain and who won't. Incredibly, there is no relationship between the damage and the degree of pain felt.
You may be quite shocked to hear that chronic pain is exactly the same as emotional pain, but in fact fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) shows that this is the case. Acute pain uses different nerve paths, but a map of chronic pain looks just like a map of anger, or a map of sadness.
So this is why, if you've had your back pain for a long time, despite trying many treatments, you are most likely to have chronic pain, and this article is most likely to help you.
ELIMINATE YOUR BACK PAIN IN 7 STEPS
Step 1: Eliminating Stress. If you have chronic pain, your nervous system is behaving a lot like a faulty car alarm that is going off for no good reason. The more stressed you are, the more your pain signalling will behave in this way. If your nerves are jangling, your pain will be worse. So you need to make a decision to deal with the stress in your life, today.
Step 2: Emotional Reactions. Do you have strong emotional reactions to things? This doesn't help chronic pain because it heightens the reactivity of your nervous system. You might be surprised to learn that there are actually ways to switch off unwanted emotional reactions so that you feel calm and can think more clearly, even in a crisis. Check out www.bmsa-int.com, which is a site for medical practitioners who are using this method very successfully with their clients.
Step 3: It's called social engagement. Yes, you definitely need to mix with people in a way that gives you pleasure. There's a whole field of science devoted to the health advantages (mental and physical) that comes from being involved with people socially, so when you have pain, you especially need to pay attention to this.
Step 4: Being Active. People who don't get enough physical activity have death rates higher than the combined rates of smoking, drinking, and unsafe sex! That's how important physical activity is. Physical activity increases your metabolic rate and gives you energy, boosts your immune system and supports good health, and keeps your muscles strong so that they support your bones and joints properly. There's always a way to increase activity, no matter how disabling your pain is, and no matter your movement constraints.
Step 5: Have an Interest or Hobby. When we've got nothing to think about except our pain, our pain gets worse. It's as if the nervous system picks up on all the attention it's getting and delivers more! The more you can get your focus absorbed in something else, the more you can help to trick your nervous system into shutting down the pain signalling.
Step 6: Are there any unhelpful family dynamics going on? Pain is a warning signal but the warning is not necessarily about anything going on in your body. It can be that your brain thinks you have a need to be dependent on others, or that your brain thinks you need protection from doing too much for others. And so it gives you pain. These co-dependency issues can generate all sorts of both physical and psychological symptoms, so it's certainly worth investigating them.
Step 7: Treat the pain itself - directly. It used to be that there was very little that could be done for true chronic pain - most treatments were ineffective or disappointing. But now we have BMSA (Brief, Multi-Sensory Activation) which clinical trials demonstrate to be successful in nearly 100% of people. Try out BMSA for yourself by following the instructions below!
TRY THIS BMSA EXPERIMENT
We'd like you to try out BMSA for yourself to experience how it works. It might look unusual to you because it's unlikely you've used anything like this before. The aim is to mix up sensory signalling, and so it does need to be at least a little confusing.
Get into a comfortable position, sitting or standing, and take a moment to think about how your pain actually feels to you. In your own words, make up a sentence that accurately describes precisely what you feel. Here's an example:
I have this deep ache near my left hip I have this stabbing pain just above my tailbone I have this burning pain in the middle of my lower back but a bit to the left Etc, etc, etc.
What we've done with these examples is to to describe how the pain actually feels (the type of pain) and where it feels like it's located, in our own words. Once you've done that for your own pain, decide how strong it is, using 10 as your benchmark. 10 out of 10 is the strongest pain you could imagine, and if you have 0, your pain would be completely gone.
Now you're going to say that statement over and over again, maybe 12 times, each time saying something silly on the end of it. And at the same time you're going to keep up a quick tapping process all over your head and body, using your fingertips to tap on your head, shoulders, face, chest, legs, anywhere you can reach. Mix it up, using tapping on the spot, tapping out shapes or letters of the alphabet.
In the example given above "I have this deep ache near my left hip", for instance, you could be tapping along saying:
"I have this deep ache near my left hip, but butterflies are crunchy."
You repeat this whole sentence a dozen times while you keep up the tapping process. That's called a "bracket". At the end of the bracket, keep focussing on the pain, and as you do that tap repeatedly on your chest while you take a deep breath through your nose and then exhale forcefully from your mouth.
Take a couple of easy breaths and then think about your pain again. Is it still the same rating? Has the pain moved? Do you notice other pain now, instead of the one you started with? What has happened with that pain?
BMSA is much more than this, of course, but this little exercise is a simple way to experience the fact that it can at least impact on your pain. Because everyone is so different, it's impossible to predict what might happen now, whether you got an obvious effect from this or not. Some people might find their pain continues to decrease. Others will find that it comes back exactly the same or almost exactly the same. If you stick with it (see the book "The Pain Train - Time to Get Off") you're highly likely to get the result that you're after.
About the Author
Christine Sutherland is a researching clinician and specialist in treating back pain. You can read other articles on back pain on her web site.
Article Source: Articlelogy.com
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