Listen as Jarod Hall shares a lecture on 9 things every person should know about pain!
Make sure you check out the PDF that you can share with patients in your practice to help have conversations to help them make sense of their often frustrating and confusing journey.
Your PAIN is real
Don’t ever let anyone tell you it isn’t
PAIN is an experience not a sensation
Contrary to popular belief, pain does not come in from the body and go up to the brain. Instead, pain is an experience you create in response to information coming in from your body as well as many other factors such as your expectations, mental status, and the context of the environment you are in.
PAIN ≠ Tissue damage
Even though pain can, and often does, occur as a result of tissue damage in your body, there are several examples in which people have pain without tissue damage such as in phantom limb pain, migraines, fibromyalgia, and many more. Alternatively, there are studies demonstrating real changes to people’s body tissue without any experience of pain at all (disc bulges, osteoarthritis, rotator cuff tears, meniscus tears, etc!)
PAIN is more complex than we ever imagined
As alluded to above, the experience of pain has many more factors that influence it than we ever expected. Studies now show that stress levels, negative thoughts, sleep disturbances, poor diet, depression, the context of a situation, and much more can affect how much pain you might feel!
WORDS have the power to make PAIN BETTER or WORSE
Several studies to date have demonstrated that using negative language about an injury or the integrity of your body can actually worsen your pain and potentially lead to more disability as a result of your pain!
IMAGING (CT, X-ray, MRI) has the power to make PAIN BETTER or WORSE
Despite how useful and wonderful the advent of diagnostic imaging has been, it has also come with a dark side. Several studies to date have demonstrated that seeing normal bodily changes on imaging under the assumption these changes are harmful can actually worsen your pain and potentially lead to more disability as a result of your pain!
Movement can be among the most powerful ways to improve your PAIN
It may seem counterintuitive, but in the case of most injuries and painful conditions, gradual return to activity and exercise have been shown to be beneficial for pain and healing!
Know PAIN = Know GAIN
Knowing more about pain can help us to all make more appropriate decision about how we should respond to and treat it, and if every single person, medical professional or not, knows about pain we can protect all of society against the implications of overly simplified biomedical explanations for one’s pain.
You can still live WELL with PAIN
Understanding more about pain helps us to reduce the fear associated with pain and reframe what pain means. If we are able to recycle our outdated and unattainable views and beliefs that pain always needs to be reduced or removed we can work towards greater success with treatment, achievement of goals, and improvement of life.