Master your pain ...by the doctor who learned to fix herself
As a medical doctor and a researcher, i’ve studied pain for more than 20 years. i’ve also lived with pain for most of my adult life, suffering from weekly migraines, constant sciatic pain, occasional knee and hip pain, and early osteoarthritis in the small joints of my hands.
i know how it feels when you can’t sleep on either side for more than five minutes without pain. i’ve woken in the early hours with awful migraine, knowing i have an important meeting in the morning.
chronic pain — pain that persists for more than three months, often in more than one part of the body — is thought to affect around 28 million adults in the UK. in europe, around 100 million live with it; globally, it’s about 1.5 billion. You aren’t alone.
in my work, i help people trying to get on with life despite their pain. i can say with confidence that you can learn to live well with chronic pain, whatever the cause.
i say this based on my own experience, both as a specialist and a sufferer, as well as the latest research data.
something i encourage my patients to think about is putting together a ‘toolbox’ for good pain management. it should contain many different tools for different situations — and i have personally tested all of the tools that i recommend here.
most of them don’t involve medication and aren’t quick fixes, but are instead lifestyle-related aids, from prioritising sleep to visualisation techniques.
learning a new pain management method takes, on average, a couple of months — treating chronic pain is not like many other conditions, and expecting a speedy solution only leads to despair and frustration. so be patient and take your time with new approaches.
don’t give up, even if it initially seems there are no results. Follow these steps to change your life… that your pain is imagined. Pain is always real, and genuinely felt. This has been revealed by new research using brain imaging techniques that can measure pain reactions objectively.
at the same time, pain is always in our heads. What i mean is, pain is experienced in the brain, mainly within the cerebral cortex — the outermost part, made up of what we sometimes call ‘grey matter’.
For example, if you scratch your foot with a nail, the sensation is conveyed as an electric signal from the skin through receptors and nerve fibres to the cerebral cortex. This part of the brain then processes the signal and quickly gives it importance.
The trouble is, our brain can play tricks on us. How we ‘file’ the pain signals can be influenced by our memories, our past experiences of pain, the people