Bio-Psycho-Social Components of Pain
In order to understand chronic pain management you need to first understand the concept of pain. Pain is a signal from the body to the brain that tells you something is wrong. There are three components of pain—biological, psychological, and social/cultural.
Pain is a signal from the body to the brain that tells you something is wrong
Pain is a total biopsychosocial experience. You hurt physically. You psychologically respond to the pain by thinking, feeling, and acting. You think about the pain and try to figure out what is causing it and why you’re hurting. You experience emotional reactions to the pain. You may get angry, frightened, or frustrated by your pain. You talk about your pain with family, friends, and coworkers who help you to develop a social and cultural context for assigning meaning to your personal pain experience and taking appropriate action.
Three Essential Levels of Chronic Pain Management
Modern pain management systematically approaches the treatment of pain at all three levels (bio-psycho-social) simultaneously. This means using physical treatments to reduce the intensity of your physical pain. It also means using psychological treatments to identify and change your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are making your pain more intense and replacing them with positive thinking, as well as feeling and behavior management skills that can reduce the intensity of your pain.
Finally, effective pain management must involve not only you, but also the significant people in your life who can help you to develop a social and cultural context in which to experience your pain in a way that will reduce suffering.
Biological Pain is a signal that something is going wrong with your body. The biological, or physical, pain sensations are critical to human survival. Without pain we would have no way of knowing that something was wrong with our body. So without pain we would be unable to take action to correct the problem or deal with the situation that is causing our pain.
Psychological Pain results from the meaning that you assign to the pain signal. The psychological symptoms include both cognitive (thinking changes) and emotional (uncomfortable feelings) that lead to suffering. Most people are not able to differentiate between the physical and psychological. All they know is “I hurt.” For effective pain management you need to learn all you can about your pain.
Social and Cultural Pain, results from the social and cultural meaning assigned by other people to the pain you are experiencing, and whether or not the pain is recognized as being severe enough to warrant a socially approved sick role. These three components determine whether the signal from your body to your brain is interpreted as pain or suffering.
To learn more about effective chronic pain management please check out my article The Need for Multidisciplinary Chronic Pain Management, 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 are working with people undergoing chronic pain management and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing their chronic pain and coexisting psychological disorders; including depression, addiction and other coexisting psychological disorders effectively; please consider my book Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders: Using the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System. To purchase this book please Click Here.
To learn about my upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment