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What Causes Chronic Pain?
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Chronic pain is my second largest client group (behind fatigue). I see people for a range of pain conditions including fibromyalgia, CRPS (complex regional pain syndrome), migraines, constant daily headache, chronic pain syndrome, central sensitivity syndrome and more. I have seen around 80-90% of my clients resolve their pain condition. This has led to an endorsement from an orthopaedic surgeon who was amazed how quickly his patients have recovered after coming to Empower Therapies.
Pain, as an acute reaction, is very useful – it helps protect people from touching hot stoves or walking on a broken limb and making it worse. However, for many of my clients, they are experiencing pain way beyond the original expiry of an injury, or have pain levels far more severe than expected for an injury, or there never was a physical injury in the first place. This has now become chronic pain. In this case, their brain has started sending false pain messages to their body and has got stuck in a neurological loop that keeps repeating. Their experience of the pain is very real – it is definitely pain – but it is being caused by false messages and faulty pain gateways through their body.
If you have acute pain, you are best to go to A&E. Chronic pain, in which your Doctor has already ruled out medical causes, responds very well to mind-body techniques. At Empower Therapies, you can attend a four day course called The Switch. You will learn how to calm the stress response to help your whole body relax and regulate itself better, including regulating your pain gates better. You will learn how your thinking patterns are exacerbating your pain gates and you will use techniques for interrupting these thinking patterns to help rewire your neural pathways back to a normal pattern. You will also release past emotional trauma that is now causing a tension pattern in your body that is causing pain.
If you don’t feel quite ready to jump into a four-day course, you might like to start with our webinar series, which gives an overview of mind-body health, the role of stress and thinking patterns, and some basic techniques to start using on yourself. This webinar is a general approach, rather than being specifically about chronic pain. For some people, it’s enough on its own, and for others, it is their inspiration and lead-in to doing the full Switch
Sign up for The Switch® full programme!
1. Get your hope back about recovery being possible by watching some of the movies on this website. Just knowing that there is an answer can help people to relax and calm their stress response and start getting improvements.
2. Start actively reducing your stress response by doing things like meditation, breathing exercises, and activities that you find particularly relaxing.
3. Every time you catch yourself thinking about your pain, immediately make yourself think about something else instead. If you re-route your brain often enough, you can start creating changes to those faulty neural pathways.
4. Spend time everyday visualising all your pain gates shutting (perhaps you need to do some gate maintenance such as painting them, squirting CRC on the hinges et cetera?), or imagining a giant truck jack knifing on a motorway, blocking all the pain traffic from getting through. An orthopaedic surgeon has reported good results with his clients by getting them to use this imagery, as it helps to slow down the automatic pain message traffic going through your body.
If these suggestions fix your pain – FANTASTIC! If these very simple interventions are not enough for you, that’s OK. We have a lot of far more comprehensive techniques and education available at The Switch that will allow you to make bigger transformations.
* Disclaimer: Mel Abbott is not a medically trained doctor. She is trained in psychology and neuro-linguistic programming. She uses mind-body interventions to help calm the stress response and allow natural healing to occur in the body. This can be used alongside mainstream treatments if you choose. She does not offer diagnoses or medication advice. She recommends that clients return to their doctors after her treatment to confirm that they no longer have their condition and to be advised about safe weaning from their medication.
Mel does careful assessments prior to the programme and only offers places to people whom she thinks would benefit from it. She follows up with all her clients at several junctions after their course and collates the data from their feedback forms to produce the statistics on this website. She is therefore confident that her interventions are helping over 80% of her clients to achieve significant improvements to their health. While many clients report that they have made a full recovery, Mel cannot guarantee this outcome. So far there are no independent research studies or peer reviewed journal articles about The Switch®, though she would welcome such studies to take place.
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