Stress can inflame existing health conditions and exasperate pain. However, this does not need to be the case. Contact us today for Fast Effective treatment and learn how to recognise these warning signs and manage your pain levels.
Many conditions such as psoriasis, eczema, asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic pain and migraine, have an emotional component. Stressful events often trigger an outbreak because emotions affect health - and vice versa.
We will look at what stressor's were around when the symptoms started, and also complete an informal emotional needs audit to establish how a healthier balance can be achieved.
Guided imagery and general relaxation techniques are also central in maximising the potential of the mind-body connection. Our minds have great influence over our bodies and we can easily access this resource and use it to our benefit.
"Doctors prescribe medicines, of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of which they know nothing"
- Voltaire
"Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also love of humanity"
- Hippocrates
"It is much more important to know what sort of patient has a disease than what sort of disease a patient has"
- Sir William Osler
"Don't defy the diagnosis, try to defy the verdict"
- Norman Cousins
"Pain has an element of blank. It cannot be recollect when it began, or if there were a day when it was not.
It has no future but itself. Its infinite realms contain its past, enlightened to perceive new periods of pain"
- Emily Dickinson
"In most mental illnesses the capacity to relax is as much impaired as the integrity of a bone destroyed by fracture"
- A Myerson
"But that I can save him from days of torture, that is what is my great and ever new privilege. Pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself"
- Dr Albert Schweistzer
"Care more for the individual patient than for the special features of the disease"
- Sir William Osler
"Any problem, whether it manifests itself physically or emotionally, affects the whole person. It is the whole person who needs the treatment"
-
"Fear generates anxiety and anxiety focuses the attention. The more attention is locked the worse the pain"
- Dr Patrick Wall
"Nothing is more essential in the treatment of serious illness than the liberation of the patient from panic and foreboding"
- Norman Cousins
"I enjoy convalescences. It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile"
- George Bernard Shaw
"There's nothing wrong with you that what's right with you could not fix"
- Baruch Shalem
Additional Information on how to Manage Pain and Accelerate Healing.
Until at least three-quarters of the way through the last century, the idea that our attitudes and reactions to events in our lives could have an impact on our body ’s defence systems was anathema (vehement disagreement) to most mainstream physicians. In the 1920's the Russian scientist Pavlov discovered that the immune system could be conditioned by experience. Fifty years later a similar discovery made by an American scientist caused an explosion in the interest and the understanding that the healing response is a rich system of mind/body connections.
The field is now inelegantly known as 'psychoneuroimmunology', but is none the less exciting for that. Whereas it was once thought that the brain and the immune system carried out their separate businesses, unable to influence each other, what psychoneuroimmunologists revealed is that there are strong interconnections, enabling our thoughts and our feelings to play an important part in our physical health. The hormones which course through o ur bodies when we are under chronic stress can impair immune function. Emotional reactions, by equally complex routes, can impair the functioning of specific organs.
A meta-analysis of about 100 smaller studies confirmed that certain emotional 'attitudes' (i.e. emotions experienced long term, almost as a character trait, such as chronic anxiety, prolonged grief, tension, hostility, suspicion and pessimism) could double the risk of a whole range of diseases, including heart disease, headache, asthma, arthritis, peptic ulcers and skin disorders.
The experience of pain is not at all straight forward. Although all pain has both physical and psychological components, this fact has not been widely recognised. We cannot assume a simple cause-and-effect relationship between the severity of an injury experienced and the amount of pain suffered. Very many doctors still believe that serious pain can only be explained by significant physical damage.
The brain plays an enormously important part in how we perceive pain, sometimes preventing us from feeling pain after an extensive injury but causing us to experience pain in limbs that we no longer have. But when we realise that pain is multi-dimensional and that any division between brain and body is purely artificial, other possibilities for understanding and managing pain instantly come to the fore.
The Signalling of Pain.
So, what exactly happens when we experience pain? We now know that it is triggered, maintained or exacerbated not just by the sensations of pain sent up along nerve fibres to the brain from the damaged body tissues but also by the brain itself, through how we think and feel about the pain. This is shown vividly in the 'gate control' theory of pain, put forward by a British physiologist, the late Patrick Wall, who was one of the world's leading experts on pain, and his equally renowned colleague, Canadian psychologist Robert Melzack. They suggested that there is a gating system in the central nervous system that opens and closes to let pain messages through to the brain or to stop them. This is how it works.
There are three kinds of sensory nerve fibres just under our skins, which are all involved in the pain business: TheA-delta fibresthat are sensitive to sudden fierce pressure or extreme temperatures and convey them super-speedily to the spinal cord and brain. At the point of entry to the spinal cord is the most amazing computer-type processing system, via which the information is sent to the brain and simultaneously, if appropriate, to the motor neurons (the nerves involved in movement). Even before the brain has got the message, our hand has moved out of harms way. TheA-beta fibreshit a mute button; they are sensitive to gentle pressure, so when they register the rubbing or the cooling water, they head off to the spinal cord and, on the way, turn down the pain signals.
Just as the spinal cord sends the pain messages it receives up to the brain, so the brain also sends down its own pain message to the spinal cord, which in turn gets relayed to the bit of the body that is hurting. And the brain's contribution as you might imagine, concerns what it makes of the whole procedure. The brain doesn't just react to pain. It can also set up the re action.
The role of the C fibres is to respond to pressure from the damaged tissue and to the chemical contents that may be released as a result of the damage, which they transport to the spinal cord to let it know about ongoing changes in the tissue. This mechanism keeps C fibres sensitized and firing, so that the brain gets the message that we need to take care of an injury while it is healing. But again this is two way traffic, and how our brains respond to the ongoing experience of the pain signalled by the C fibres also dictates how intensely we experience the pain.
Techniques to Take Care of Yourself.
Human Givens College - SeminarHow to manage pain and accelerate healing.
Human Givens PublishingBook by Dr Graham Brown.
