Coping with Chronic Pain

Contributed by Jackie Waters

Living with chronic pain can drain you physically and emotionally. It’s normal to experience frustration when you’re unable to do the things you used to do. Aching muscles, sore joints, and fatigue are just a few of the symptoms chronic pain sufferers deal with on a daily basis. Whether you have fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis, or any other disease that causes pain, you know that such a condition transforms your life into a day-to-day battle. If you’ve recently been diagnosed with a chronic pain condition, read these tips to help you cope.

What Is Chronic Pain?

 Chronic pain is any pain that lasts more than six months. People can experience chronic pain for a number of reasons. It may be triggered by an injury or even a sickness. Often, there is no apparent cause for the pain. In the past, doctors thought pain was always the result of a disease or undiagnosed injury. As a result, doctors concentrated on treating the cause of the pain. They believed curing the cause would automatically eliminate the problem. If the patient wasn’t cured, doctors sometimes told patients that they were imagining their pain. Fortunately, today’s medical professionals realize that chronic pain is a disease and not some phantom pain inside a patient’s head.

Over-the-Counter and Prescription Painkillers

 In the past, traditional methods of treating chronic pain typically included over-the-counter and prescription painkillers. But the negatives far outweigh the positives. Using prescription painkillers can lead to liver failure and stomach ulcers. And it’s easy to become addicted to painkillers as well. Doctors now recognize that alternative treatments help reduce the symptoms associated with chronic pain. Even better, these alternative treatments don’t lead to addiction or other negative effects.

Give Your Body a Rest at Home

 It’s okay to take breaks to help relieve chronic pain. While you rest, let others help you get things done. Ask a friend or family member to run an errand for you. Another option to consider is calling a professional on occasion to take care of a home project, like doing yard work or cleaning the house. You can find a service within your budget by searching online. If you absolutely need to do your own cleaning, look for a vacuum that’s lightweight and easily maneuvered so you don’t strain yourself.

Exercise

 If you want to treat chronic pain using natural methods, incorporate exercise into your daily life. When you are physically active, the body releases natural hormones called endorphins that work as natural painkillers. Endorphins affect brain receptors, changing the way we perceive pain.

Before you begin an exercise regimen, discuss your plans with your physician. As long as your doctor says it’s okay, start a gradual exercise routine. Do easy stretches each day. If you find your joints are sore and tight, try taking a warm bath or shower before beginning your workout. Yoga, tai chi and Pilates are all gentle forms of exercise that help some chronic pain sufferers. And, of course, you can’t go wrong with good, old-fashioned walking!

Combine a Balanced Diet with Natural Supplements

 Incorporating more vegetables and whole, clean foods into your diet makes you healthier. A healthy diet can help reduce inflammation in your body, which is linked to chronic pain. Additionally, probiotic foods and supplements can help your body and mind become healthier by boosting the immune system, aiding in digestion, and increasing emotional health. Probiotics contain good strains of microbes that work in your gut, and since around 95 percent of all your microbes are in your gut, it’s especially important to take care of it. 

Acupuncture and Other Natural Therapies

Some people with chronic pain experience relief through acupuncture. It’s an ancient Chinese healing method where tiny, thin needles are inserted into specific parts of the body to relieve pain and stimulate healing. Other natural therapies may include massage or relaxation therapy. Some pain sufferers benefit from guided imagery, when a trained professional teaches you to focus your mind on specific images so you’re not concentrating on the pain you feel.

Just because you’ve recently been diagnosed with a chronic pain condition doesn’t mean you need to give up on an active lifestyle. Talk with your physician and devise a strategy to combat your chronic pain. As you incorporate lifestyle changes and investigate various therapies and treatments, you just might find the right combination that will help you alleviate your pain triggers and place you on the road to a happier, pain-free life.

New research provides hope for people living with chronic pain

September 9, 2019

Science Daily/University of Calgary

Researchers have been investigating which brain circuits are changed by injury, in order to develop targeted therapies to reset the brain to stop chronic pain.

When you experience severe pain, like breaking or shattering a bone, the pain isn't just felt at the sight of the injury. There is an entire network of receptors in your body running from the site of the injury, through your nervous system, along the spine and into the brain that reacts to tell you how much pain you are feeling. This system goes into high alert when the injury occurs, and then usually resets as you heal. However, sometimes, the system doesn't reset, and even though the injury has mended, nerve damage has caused your brain to be permanently altered. It means you still feel the pain, even though the injury has fully healed.

Dr. Gerald Zamponi, PhD, and a team with the Cumming School of Medicine's Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) and researchers at Stanford University, California, have been investigating which brain circuits are changed by injury, in order to develop targeted therapies to reset the brain to stop chronic pain.

"It's a terrible situation for many people living with chronic pain, because there is often very little that works for them to control their pain," says Zamponi, senior associate dean (research) and a professor in the departments of Physiology & Pharmacology and Cell Biology & Anatomy at the CSM. "This doesn't just impact people who have experienced peripheral nerve damage. There are cases of people having a stroke and are experiencing severe pain afterward in another part of their body. It may also explain why some people who have lost a limb can still feel pain in the limb even though it's no longer there."

Working closely with Dr. Junting Huang, PhD, and Dr. Vinicius Gadotti, PhD, co-first authors on the study, along with Dr. Zizhen Zhang, PhD, the team utilized optogenetics to study the neuron connections in the brains of mice. Optogenetics allow scientists to use light to target and control individual neurons in the brain. With this tool, researchers are able to map a pathway showing which neurons are communicating with each other to process a pain signal and then communicate this information all the way back through the spine where painful stimuli are first processed.

"We've known that certain parts of the brain are important for pain, but now we've been able to identify a long range circuit in the brain that carries the message and we've been able to show how it is altered during chronic pain states," says Zamponi who is also a member of the CSM's Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institute.

Much of the research for chronic pain has been focused on the spinal cord and targeting nerve fibres where the pain response is processed. Treatment with current pain relief medications is often ineffective and can have serious side effects. This new understanding of the pain signaling circuit may allow scientists to develop new drug therapies and targeted brain stimulation treatments to address chronic nerve pain, and hopefully provide relief for pain sufferers. Working with mice, Zamponi's lab has proven that targeting certain pathways in the brain can interfere with the pain signal and stop pain sensation.

"If you understand how the brain rewires itself, you can interfere with that and you can restore it. That's important," says Zamponi. "If you think about it, there are some drugs you don't want to give to kids who have chronic pain. What if you could non-invasively stimulate certain brain regions or inhibit them, and bring pain relief that way? I think it would be a tremendous, alternative approach to taking drugs."

Zamponi expects the results the lab has seen in mice will be comparable in humans. While the human brain is very complex, the communication network is similar in the animal brain. Findings are published in Nature Neuroscience.

The Zamponi lab is already applying this research to investigate how this brain circuit interacts with other parts of the brain involved in more complex behaviours like the interaction between pain pathways and addiction, depression, and anxiety.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190909113027.htm