Health and Wellness Access

by Christine Sutherland

Why You Still Have Back Pain, Despite Treatment, and How to Get the Results You Want

The Facts

Back pain, whether lower back pain or upper back pain, is the most common of all chronic pain complaints, and yet most people discover that their pain program is next to useless.

Here in Australia failed chronic pain programs waste over $12 billion every year. It’s even worse in the USA, at more than $24 billion per annum. When you add on the costs of lost wages, and lost productivity, the total costs skyrocket into outer space! So this is an enormous burden on society, but of course these figures betray an enormity of human suffering that is truly frightening.

The experience of pain is common to almost everyone, but the thought of living in agony from day to day isn’t something most of us ever have to face. For those with back pain, or neck pain, every movement, sometimes even breathing, can bring that agony.

Current methods have failed to help back pain patients in the majority of cases and I hope that the methods described here will replace those ineffective methods. Australian research demonstrates that it’s now possible to bring immediate relief to the majority of people with back pain or neck main, with most of those achieving total elimination, regardless of how long they’ve suffered.

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.

If you’d like to read more about the research, more comprehensive information is freely available on the web site.

This report should be useful in helping you to:

** Understand the myths of back pain treatment so that it’s clear to you why your treatment hasn’t worked.

** Finally discover a treatment method for back pain that is based on sound evidence, and which has a high probability of helping you.

If you do decide you’d like to try the chronic pain program outlined here, it’s crucial that you first have a diagnosis of chronic pain from your doctor, so that we can ensure there isn’t any treatable underlying medical condition. With accurate diagnosis, we can then be more assured of getting the result you want.

On no account should you self-diagnose any condition, and all unexplained pain should be investigated. If you choose to do the chronic pain program, whether solely through the application of what you learn in this report, or through the on-line program on www.realhelpforchronicpain.com, you should do so only under the supervision of your qualified medical specialist.

THE THEORY OF PAIN – HOW WE GOT IT WRONG

In olden times our beliefs about the nature of pain were quite strange and mystical, bearing little relationship to current day knowledge of anatomy! In recent times there’s been excellent progress in the understanding and treatment of acute pain, but with few exceptions, research in chronic pain has failed to produce any real benefit. This is why most health professionals still don’t have an acceptable way to help back pain patients.

You see, we now know that acute pain and chronic pain are worlds apart in nature, and even use 2 different nerve paths, as I’ll shortly explain.

It is only very recently that this was clearly understood and better interventions have begun to be developed. (For a better understanding of the benefits and shortcomings of the variety of current chronic pain treatments, please download the more comprehensive report on 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!

Thoughts and attitudes certainly do help produce pain, but it’s an enormous mistake to assume that there is any significant conscious control over these. These things are mediated unconsciously, and we regard blaming the patient’s thinking or speech as both ignorant and cruel.

We now have an intelligent, proven, and human alternative to those outdated methods, where we permanently “decondition” the emotional states attached to the thoughts, attitudes and beliefs that have become linked to the pain. When pain can be relieved so simply and easily, why would anyone want to do it the hard way?

The third area where we didn’t so much “get it wrong” as much as just didn’t know, because the scientific tools to demonstrate this weren’t yet developed, was how the brain actually processes chronic pain. Brain imaging techniques have clearly demonstrated that the brain activity that typifies chronic pain signalling is almost identical to that created by emotional pain such as fear, anger or other emotional distress.

Does it seem incredible to you that other researchers haven’t seen or understood what this means in terms of what we already know about learning theory and memory? If only they would realise that chronic pain is created by the same brain processes that create conditioned responses, or store and retrieve a memory.

Sadly, the outcome of our past and current misunderstanding of the nature of chronic pain has lead to a proliferation of programs which have the intention of “helping the patient to live with his pain”, rather than the reduction or even elimination of that pain altogether.

It’s no wonder that treatment with strong pain killers, surgery to cut nerve branches, cognitive behaviour therapy, hydrotherapy, chiropractic therapy, acupuncture and osteopathy have all proven to be woefully inadequate to help people in any permanent way with back pain.

A SENSIBLE, PROVEN APPROACH TO BACK PAIN

There is now a whole easier, far more effective way to help people with chronic pain, which does not blame the patient for his thinking, which does not treat the patient as a body without a brain, and which accurately targets the real cause of your back pain, which is conditioned activity of the brain and 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.

Over the last 6 years when clinical research has been carried out in Australia, we’ve come to expect that approximately 95 per cent of patients with chronic back pain will achieve total elimination of their back pain, or at least reduce it by more than half.

More information on this approach to treating chronic back pain is available from the web site, including some interesting case studies.

About the Author:

Christine Sutherland is a researching clinician and a specialist in unrelenting back pain. More detailed info on why current programs often fail, and what you can do about your back pain is freely available.