Health & Fitness
New/Old Remedy for Chronic Pain
Suffering from unexplained chronic pain? Read about the new therapy doctors are increasingly recommending to patients to alleviate and often eliminate the pain.
Today with the prolific medical information available at our fingertips for the detection of illness, patients increasingly have the expectation that every pain or physical abnormality should have a diagnosis and a correlated treatment to eliminate it.
However, despite modern medical advances, studies show that a great number of symptoms today remain unexplained and seem to be untreatable. This has prompted doctors to try to find new ways to deal with their patients medically unexplained symptoms.
A 2011 study of 620 German primary care patients published in the journal Psychosomatics, found that medically unexplained symptoms made up two thirds of all reported symptoms. (See The Wall Street Journal article called “The symptoms can be real, but the cause a mystery” in the Feb 25, 2014 WSJ) These “unexplained symptoms” can be everything from back pain, to nausea, to headaches to stomach pain, dizziness or fatigue.
Frustrated with a lack of answers, patients often continually return to the doctor for testing or they turn repeatedly to internet sites that might offer possible diagnoses. Yet Doctors are finding that the patients excessive attention to the symptoms doesn’t often result in answers, rather it can even make a patient feel worse.
One treatment that is gaining in popularity for these unexplained, yet persistent symptoms, is to turn to Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) or mindfulness therapy. The goal of these mental therapies is to help a patient to stop ruminating about or excessively researching their symptoms and potential illnesses and instead turn to more enjoyable activities and positive thought patterns.
Looking back the past 150 years, one can see that this is not a new idea but rather a new name for a common practice in the 19th and early 20th century when mind-body medicine and spiritual healing were more prevalent. A well known mind-body practitioner of the day, Mary Baker Eddy, spent years exploring various mental techniques and experimented with them on her own patients. She noted from her experience working with patients with seemingly chronic pain, that “If one turns away from the body with such absorbed interest as to forget it, the body experiences no pain.”
However, it wasn’t just turning away from the body and it’s nagging symptoms that would bring relief, she found that it required an active engagement of thought focused on health-promoting ideas, that would bring relief and healing. “Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thought.” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures)
Rather than focusing on or even issuing a diagnosis, Eddy would turn the patient in a completely new direction focusing instead on their spiritual foundation for life and their constant, health promoting relationship with God, who is Divine Mind and knows all things. Eddy then proved these ideas during a decades long career in spiritual healing liberating patients from chronic pain and other so-called untreatable diseases of the times. New advances in medicine had, for a time, rendered these practices unpopular or seemingly obsolete, but once again it is coming to the forefront of patient care.
While some may find CBT or such mind-body practices to be laborious and not the quick and easy fix they were hoping for, it seems inevitable that eliminating or even reducing the anxiety about ones health, will be beneficial to the patient both mentally and physically.
