Nonpharmacological Chronic Pain Management

Nonpharmacological (non-medication based) treatments have proven effective for many pain conditions. For example, recent studies have shown that endorphins mediate the analgesic effects of acupuncture and placebos as well. Still to be discovered is the mechanism by which hypnosis accomplishes its analgesic effects.
The Addiction-Free Pain Management® System uses both of the components that were described earlier along with the nonpharmacological processes briefly described below. You will be provided with a more extensive overview of these and more nonpharmacological approaches in a later chapter. Since each of you has your own unique problems, different combinations will be needed for each person.
Please find below a starting point for developing your own nonpharmacological chronic pain management plan.

1. Breathing & Relaxation: When you are in a pain flare up your body’s automatic reaction often includes a reflexive tensing response. This can lead to your being unable to relax the locus of the pain, which results in increased muscle tension in these areas. You need to consciously practice relaxing the affected muscles. This enables you to modulate your pain levels and bring the pain under your control without needing to increase your medication. Using deep slow breathing can help you soften and relax your over-tense muscles.
2. Increasing Activity/Fitness: When you experience pain flare ups, you may become very sedentary, with strong avoidance tendencies for many types of activities. The two primary reasons for this are the pain itself, and your own predictions (anticipatory pain) regarding the negative impact of activity. Therefore, it is crucial to return to more normal levels of activities and then slowly increase your stamina for physical activities. The goal is to extinguish conditioned avoidance patterns.
3. Diffusing/Reducing Emotional Over-reactivity: When you are experiencing intense uncomfortable emotions—especially about being in pain—your pain levels actually intensify. Your emotions become like an amplifier circuit that increases the “volume” of your pain. You need to practice specific methods of reducing this automatic process that occurs in the face of stressful triggers. You need to realize that you may not be able to eliminate these problematic emotional triggers, but what you can learn are different methods of reacting and managing your feelings.
4. External Focusing/Distraction: The more you focus on your pain, the more you actually intensify your experience of the pain. You need to learn to shift and manipulate your focus of attention in a positive way, which will minimize your experience of the pain. This can be accomplished by changing how you think and feel about your pain. You can then find pleasant activities or tasks to take your focus off of your pain.
   Using Anything That Works: There are numerous interventions that you can attempt when your pain flares up. In addition to those listed above you can use breathing, muscle relaxation, visual imagery, music, cold/heat, stretching, massage therapy, stress management, acupuncture, acupressure, TENS Unit, journaling, hydrotherapy, etc.
5. My Personal Plan: Try to imagine yourself in a situation when you are experiencing a pain flare up and you need to intervene in a positive and proactive manner. Then using the above interventions as a starting point, please list your step-by step action plan—your plan should have at least four (4) interventions—again, the more the better.

Another useful nonpharmacological intervention is learning to manage Anticipatory Pain. To learn more about chronic pain management and changing your perception of pain please check out my article Coping with Anticipatory Pain , that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website http://www.addiction-free.com/ If you or a loved one is undergoing chronic pain management, especially if you're in recovery or believe you may have a medication or other mental health problem and you want to learn more effective chronic pain management tools, please go to our Publications page and check out my books; especially the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. To purchase this book please Click Here.

To read the latest issue of Chronic Pain Solutions Newsletter please Click here. If you want to sign up for the newsletter, please Click here and input your name and email address. You will then recieve an autoresponse email that you need to reply to in order to finalize enrollment.

To learn about my upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page. To listen to a radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods for her program One Hour at a Time please Click Here to go to this interview.