The purpose of pain is to tell us we’ve been hurt, and to keep us from making it worse. But sometimes pain loses its purpose.
Pain that persists beyond the acute phase, or when it would normally have healed is called ‘chronic pain’. This pain is real and physiologically based.
In other words, you’re not making it up and it’s not just in your head!
Psychological treatments have proven useful for chronic pain. Chronic pain is controlled by the fight/flight mechanism which keeps the sympathetic nervous system in heightened arousal pattern. Fibromyalgia and Reflex Sympathetic Dsystrophy are examples of sympathetically maintained chronic pain conditions.
In order to change the over-sensitized pain pathways, it’s necessary to interrupt them. This entails repeatedly moving your awareness from high pain areas to low pain areas, ideally in the presence of a trained professional. This process will help to neutralize the nervous system arousal pattern by re-wiring the pain pathways.
Basically, your nervous system learns to tolerate small amounts of pain. It develops a new “regulated” pathway for energy to move through your body without the pain.
No pain management treatment would be complete if it didn’t include the expertise of a health care practitioner who is familiar with assessing and supporting the glands and organs. If your viscera is not functioning properly, your recovery will be hampered by unnecessary inflammation.
I recommend that you first consult either a Traditional Chinese doctor or a naturopath. In addition to providing a comprehensive, holistic diagnosis, these practitioners can usually recommend medications that will help ease the pain.