by Christine Sutherland
WHY YOU STILL HAVE BACK PAIN, DESPITE TREATMENT, AND HOW TO GET THE RESULT YOU WANT
The Proof
The overwhelming share of chronic pain is suffered by people with back pain, and yet treatment typically fails to eliminate or even reduce the level of suffering.
In Australia the treatment cost per annum of chronic, unrelieved physical pain is over $12 billion. In the USA it is more than double that. Lost productivity and other costs skyrocket these figures into the hundreds of billions. Not only is this a huge burden on the economy and the health system, but it represents an enormity of human suffering that is both appalling and terrifying.
Most of us have experienced terrible pain. The thought of living with that agony every second of every day is luckily, for most of us, unimaginable, especially when that pain is in the back or neck, and every movement is agonising.
It is my hope that the methods described here will replace those currently being used which have little or inadequate effect. Based on our own clinical research, we know that we can achieve almost immediate relief for at least 75 per cent of people with back or neck pain. The majority of those people will achieve total elimination of their pain, even where they have suffered for many years.
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.
Our research is ongoing, and you can read more about the available research on the Real Help for Chronic Pain web site.
We hope that this report will help you to:
** Really understand why your back pain treatments have been so disappointing, and how the myths of chronic pain have led to so many incorrect treatments even by the medical profession.
** Get up to date on a treatment method for chronic pain of all kinds so that you can finally get relief.
Even though the techniques described here are highly effective, it would be a mistake to think your doctor was unnecessary! Before we can help you, you must have a proper diagnosis of chronic pain so that we have confirmation that this is the problem, and not some treatable underlying condition.
So we stress that you should never self-diagnose, and any pain should be properly investigated by a licensed medical doctor. We also stress the importance of keeping your doctor informed of your progress.
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!
It can be hard to understand this disparity in the research sector when we already have such good proof that chronic pain and acute pain are so different in their nature that they actually use 2 completely different nerve paths.
It’s really only the last 10-12 years that this vast difference between chronic and acute pain has begun to be understood, and of course it takes time for better treatment methods to filter through. A detailed discussion of current treatments and their reasons for failure is available as a free download from the web site.
The reason why chronic pain treatments have been so worthless is that they failed to take into account that the patient’s nervous system is sub-consciously affected by non-physical issues in their environment, issues that the patient often had no control over.
Read on to see how chronic pain is produced by these non-physical factors, and what you can do about it even though willpower has nothing to do with it!
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!
Yes, thoughts and attitudes (and beliefs) do help create pain. However thoughts, attitudes and beliefs are not under the patient’s control, and any therapist who tries to force the patient to change these using sheer willpower or self discipline is inflicting an ignorant and cruel treatment.
A far more humane and effective approach (which is what you will learn about here) is to identify and deal with those emotional factors and permanently resolve them, not to try to make changes through willpower.
We’ve been fortunate that technology has improved to the point where we’ve been able to clear up the misunderstanding between acute and chronic pain. Brain imaging shows conclusively that chronic pain and acute pain are entirely different, with maps of chronic pain looking just like maps for sadness, or anger, for example.
To us it’s rather incredible that no-one else seems to have identified the relationship to learning theory and memory studies. If only they had, we would get other researchers joining us instead of wasting time on red herrings! If only they would realise that the same brain processes that give rise to conditioned responses and memory also give rise to 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.
So for people with unrelenting back pain, it should be no wonder why so many different treatments, from strong analgesics, to CBT, to hydrotherapy and even surgery, have failed to deliver.
HOW BACK PAIN SHOULD BE TREATED
Now that we no longer misunderstand the nature of chronic back pain we can stop blaming the patient, and stop treating back pain as if it were an entirely physical problem. We can instead eliminate the actual cause of your unrelenting back pain, which is the conditioned activity of your central 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.
The method of treatment is BMSA, or Brief, Multi-Sensory Activation and most people can learn to self-treat very quickly and easily, gaining immediate results even when they’ve tried many other pain programs and failed.
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.
Case studies, along with more information on this new approach to treatment of back pain, are available on the web site.
About the Author:
C Sutherland is a researching clinician and an expert in chronic back pain. More detailed information about why current treatments often fail, and what you can do about your back pain is freely available.
