Passageways through pain – A mind-body approach
Have you battled with pain, trying out various treatments that have, at best,
only helped for a while?
Research has shown that in most cases, chronic pain is due to changes in the
pain messaging systems rather than structural damage in the body.
This is called neuroplastic pain.
This is the reason why many of the treatments commonly used to tackle
chronic pain, treatments which tend to only look for and target structural
damage only help with symptoms for a while, if at all.
Neuroplastic pain happens when the brain mistakenly reads messages from
the body as being harmful when they’re not.
Neuroplastic pain is also sometimes called TMS or PPD.
I think the term neuroplastic pain is the most appropriate because it captures
the fact that we are dealing with the nervous system (neural) and that just as
the pathways that are present and leading to the pain have been learned, so
too can they be unlearned as the pathways are plastic, malleable or
modifiable
By working on calming the neural systems we can actually enable our neural
pathways to relearn messages of safety, helping our brains to stand down
from the state of high alert, enabling us to move on from pain.
Are you saying the pain isn’t real, that it is in my mind??
NO, your pain is most definitely real!
All pain is experienced in the brain. Using functional MRi scans we now know
that neuroplastic pain occurs in the same regions in the brain that are
engaged when a physical injury is experienced.
I’ve had x rays / scans that show structural changes, can this approach
help me?
Absolutely this approach can and has helped so many people who have been
given a physical diagnosis !In fact many people with chronic pain will have had a test or a scan at some
point that has shown something. Things like wear and tear, degenerative
discs, impingements, disc bulges or been told things are out of alignment to
name but a few.
Most medical practitioners are, for the most part, trained to look for a physical
cause and well if you are only looking for a red car , it’s really easy to spot a
red car!
The thing is, all these findings are also present in people who have no pain.
So the pain can’t just be due to the structural findings that you may have been
told you have.
Which means that the techniques we use in Passageways Through Pain are
also really successful in helping people who have been told they have some
structural changes or abnormalities because when pain had been there for a
while, there will always be some neuroplastic components to it.
As a Physiotherapist, I understand the structural changes that can occur
within the body. As a SiRPA trained Physiotherapist I have the knowledge and
experience of the mind-body connection and its role in moving on from
chronic pain. And as someone who has suffered from a chronic pain condition
I have first hand experience of life beyond chronic pain, something that has
only been possible by learning and implementing the mind-body techniques I
now offer in Passageways Through Pain.