Back Pain Article: 

WHY BACK PAIN TREATMENTS ARE OFTEN SO INEFFECTIVE, AND HOW TO GET REAL RELIEF

The Proof

Of all chronic pain cases, back pain is overwhelmingly the most common. However most people will fail to stop the pain, and even fail to reduce it.

Here in Australia failed chronic pain programs waste over $12 billion every year. It’s even worse in the USA, at more than $24 billion per annum. When you add on the costs of lost wages, and lost productivity, the total costs skyrocket into outer space! So this is an enormous burden on society, but of course these figures betray an enormity of human suffering that is truly frightening.

The experience of pain is common to almost everyone, but the thought of living in agony from day to day isn’t something most of us ever have to face. For those with back pain, or neck pain, every movement, sometimes even breathing, can bring that agony.

It is my hope that the methods described here will replace those currently being used which have little or inadequate effect. Based on our own clinical research, we know that we can achieve almost immediate relief for at least 75 per cent of people with back or neck pain. The majority of those people will achieve total elimination of their pain, even where they have suffered for many years.

The data from the Australian research showed 100 per cent cessation of pain for half the group immediately (at the first treatment) and more than 50 per cent reduction in pain for another 25%. 6-month follow-up showed that results had held or increased except for one patient, who had continued to have high-velocity cervical spine manipulations from her chiropractor, even though her pain worsened with every visit.

If you’d like to read more about the research, more comprehensive information is freely available on the web site.

This report should be useful in helping you to:

** Appreciate how the myths of chronic pain have led to serious mistakes in treatment programs, even by the most highly-trained health professionals.

** Get up to date on a treatment method for chronic pain of all kinds so that you can finally get relief.

Even though the techniques described here are highly effective, it would be a mistake to think your doctor was unnecessary! Before we can help you, you must have a proper diagnosis of chronic pain so that we have confirmation that this is the problem, and not some treatable underlying condition.

So we stress that you should never self-diagnose, and any pain should be properly investigated by a licensed medical doctor. We also stress the importance of keeping your doctor informed of your progress.

THE THEORY OF PAIN - HOW WE GOT IT WRONG

In olden times our beliefs about the nature of pain were quite strange and mystical, bearing little relationship to current day knowledge of anatomy! In recent times there’s been excellent progress in the understanding and treatment of acute pain, but with few exceptions, research in chronic pain has failed to produce any real benefit. This is why most health professionals still don’t have an acceptable way to help back pain patients.

It is now clear that acute pain and chronic pain are very different in nature, and in fact these 2 pain types even utilise different nerve paths, as you will soon see.

But it’s only really in the last decade that the difference between chronic and acute pain has become so clear, and better treatments have been developed. If you’d like to have much more detail about the shortcomings of current treatments, you can download a more comprehensive report from the official web site.

The reason why chronic pain treatments have been so worthless is that they failed to take into account that the patient’s nervous system is sub-consciously affected by non-physical issues in their environment, issues that the patient often had no control over.

Now I’d like to describe exactly how these things produce chronic pain, and how you can stop worrying about “control” and just start eliminating it instead.

Almost all therapists have given wrong treatment based on their misunderstanding of the cause of chronic pain, even to the point of creating higher pain levels instead of reducing them.

The other area in which we “got it wrong” was that we blamed the patient for his pain, accusing him of “bringing on the pain” or “creating the pain” by his thoughts and attitudes. Several current approaches still do this.

We now know that those thoughts and attitudes certainly do help produce pain, but that they in turn are produced by unconscious emotional responses, over which the patient does not have direct control! So insisting that the patient use willpower and basically try to ignore their pain, could be seen as blatantly cruel.

There is a far more intelligent, humane, and effective approach, and that is to address the emotional factors which underly the thoughts, attitudes and beliefs that are linked to pain production, and to eliminate those using modern de-conditioning techniques. Only King Canute would be silly enough to try to do that by willpower!

We’ve been fortunate that technology has improved to the point where we’ve been able to clear up the misunderstanding between acute and chronic pain. Brain imaging shows conclusively that chronic pain and acute pain are entirely different, with maps of chronic pain looking just like maps for sadness, or anger, for example.

Does it seem incredible to you that other researchers haven’t seen or understood what this means in terms of what we already know about learning theory and memory? If only they would realise that chronic pain is created by the same brain processes that create conditioned responses, or store and retrieve a memory.

It’s tragic that the outcome of all these misunderstandings and lack of knowledge is that pain programs have been so ineffective that they best they could do was help the patient to “cope” with their pain, but not reduce it or eliminate it.

It’s no wonder that treatment with strong pain killers, surgery to cut nerve branches, cognitive behaviour therapy, hydrotherapy, chiropractic therapy, acupuncture and osteopathy have all proven to be woefully inadequate to help people in any permanent way with back pain.

A SENSIBLE, PROVEN APPROACH TO BACK PAIN

Now that we understand the true nature of chronic back pain, we can stop blaming the patient for his thinking, we can stop treating the patient as if he were merely a body part, and we can address the real “culprit” behind unrelenting back pain. This is the conditioned behaviour of your central nervous system.

Very differently to any other chronic pain program, this program is intended to eliminate your back pain. That is the aim. And it successfully eliminates pain by disrupting the mechanisms which activate your pain signalling, permanently.

This proven program is known as BMSA, or Brief, Multi-Sensory Activation therapy, and it has achieved outstanding results, even where back pain sufferers have had serious pain for many years, and even where the patient has tried and failed many other pain programs. Most people can learn to self treat very quickly and easily, and most people achieve some result from the very first treatment.

According to Australian clinical research, carried out over the last 6 years, approximately 95 per cent of patients with chronic back pain will successfully eliminate or dramatically reduce their pain.

Further reports and case studies are freely available on the web site.

Christine Sutherland is a researching clinician and a specialist in chronic back pain. More detailed information about why current treatments often fail, and what you can do about your back pain is freely available.

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