Pacing yourself, keeping active, relaxation and mindfulness really help.
Our understanding of chronic pain has changed massively over recent years. The pain that you feel is absolutely real. We know that our bodies produce pain as a way of keeping us safe. If you stick your hand in a fire, our body interprets that as painful to stop us from doing it again because it damages our body. It hurts whilst it’s healing too, in part to make us protect that area whilst it’s fragile. The weird thing about pain is that we have no pain sensors, it’s how our brain interprets signals that produce pain. In chronic pain conditions the sensitivity level of what produces a pain response is turned up, so things that shouldn’t be painful are.
There’s a famous medical case of a builder who stood on a nail and it came right through his foot and out of the top of his boot. Understandably he was in agony and was given heavy duty pain relief. In hospital however, they discovered that the nail had gone up between his toes and he wasn’t injured at all. Because his brain processed the nail being stood on and coming out of the top of his foot as meaning it had gone right through his foot it produced pain!
We also know that there seems to be a link between emotional trauma and chronic pain. Not entirely understood but we know the same part of our brain feels emotional and physical pain. They did whizzy brain scans and poked people with something sharp and saw which bits of their brain were active. They people they did this with had also recently had a nasty relationship breakup. When they asked them to think about the breakup the same bits of their brain lit up. We now think that chronic pain is caused by an over sensitive central nervous system. This means that there has been a change in the it, which means that potentially it can be unlearnt or retrained.
Medication is a small part of pain management. Opioids like morphine, codeine etc are great fir short term pain, but can actually increase pain along with lots of side effects which is why there is the current push to reduce their use. The body also becomes used to them and so needs larger doses to get the same level of pain relief .
I work in pain management and have chronic pain myself. I’m also currently reducing my morphine that I’ve been on for years. I’m now on less than half the dose I was (very slow reduction) and my pain is the same pretty much!
Never forget that your pain is absolutely real, pain management is about very gradual changes and you can live well despite pain.
There’s some really good resources on these websites.
www.flippinpain.co.uk/
my.livewellwithpain.co.uk/