Learn Forensic Science

WHY YOU STILL HAVE BACK PAIN, DESPITE TREATMENT, AND HOW TO GET THE RESULT YOU WANT

The Proof

The overwhelming share of chronic pain is suffered by people with back pain, and yet treatment typically fails to eliminate or even reduce the level of suffering.

We waste over $12 billion on failed chronic pain programs here in Australia every year, and in the USA it is more than double that. If you add on the lost wages of the sufferer, and the cost in lost productivity to businesses, the costs run into many hundreds of billions of dollars, every year. It’s easy to imagine what this does to the health system, but of even more importance is the suffering of chronic pain patients and their families.

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.

In the Australian research with long-term chronic pain patients with a history of at least 2 failed pain treatments, half the participants achieved a 100 per cent elimination of pain on the first treatment. Of the remainder, a majority enjoyed over 50 per cent reduction of their pain levels, and the results were permanent with one exception, a patient who, curiously, continued her high-velocity cervical spine manipulations even though her pain increased dramatically with each visit to her chiropractor.

The research is ongoing, with more information available on the web site.

Reading this report will help you to:

** Understand the myths of back pain treatment so that it’s clear to you why your treatment hasn’t worked.

** Learn about a scientifically proven method for treating chronic back pain that has been used successfully in Australia for the past decade.

If you do decide you’d like to try the chronic pain program outlined here, it’s crucial that you first have a diagnosis of chronic pain from your doctor, so that we can ensure there isn’t any treatable underlying medical condition. With accurate diagnosis, we can then be more assured of getting the result you want.

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.

HOW WE GOT IT SO WRONG WHEN IT CAME TO CHRONIC PAIN

Scientists and medical professionals used to have some pretty strange ideas about pain, ideas that are embarrassing when we look at them in the light of up-to-date scientific knowledge! But even though we’ve made excellent advanced in the treatment of acute pain, in contrast the treatment of chronic pain is still in the dark ages in most cases, and it’s not surprising that most back pain patients are suffering far longer than necessary, if at all!

It can be hard to understand this disparity in the research sector when we already have such good proof that chronic pain and acute pain are so different in their nature that they actually use 2 completely different nerve paths.

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.

Read on to see how chronic pain is produced by these non-physical factors, and what you can do about it even though willpower has nothing to do with it!

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.

Another very important mistake that therapists have made is where they’ve blamed the patient for creating his own pain. They haven’t been able to help the patient using the methods they believe should work, and therefore it is now conveniently the patient’s fault, and the patient must be taught to think “correctly”. This is what CBT does, and is why CBT usually fails.

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.

A far more humane and effective approach (which is what you will learn about here) is to identify and deal with those emotional factors and permanently resolve them, not to try to make changes through willpower.

The third area where we didn’t so much “get it wrong” as much as just didn’t know, because the scientific tools to demonstrate this weren’t yet developed, was how the brain actually processes chronic pain. Brain imaging techniques have clearly demonstrated that the brain activity that typifies chronic pain signalling is almost identical to that created by emotional pain such as fear, anger or other emotional distress.

It seems amazing to us that until now no-one has linked this with learning theory and memory studies. If they had, they would discover that the same processes which modulate conditioned responses and memory, also appear to modulate chronic pain.

But so far in the story of development of pain programs, misunderstanding and lack of informatioin has led to a mass of programs which have as their goal teaching the patient to “cope” with their pain, rather than actually relieving 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 TREATMENT METHOD WHICH IS PROVEN TO WORK FOR BACK PAIN

Now that we no longer misunderstand the nature of chronic back pain we can stop blaming the patient, and stop treating back pain as if it were an entirely physical problem. We can instead eliminate the actual cause of your unrelenting back pain, which is the conditioned activity of your central nervous system.

In complete contrast to every other program, this chronic pain program has as its aim the complete elimination of your back pain. And it does that by working with the mechanisms which produce your pain signals, switching them off permanently so that they never recur.

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.

Over the last 6 years when clinical research has been carried out in Australia, we’ve come to expect that approximately 95 per cent of patients with chronic back pain will achieve total elimination of their back pain, or at least reduce it by more than half.

More information on this approach to treating chronic back pain is available from the web site, including some interesting case studies.

Tags: Science

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 5:52 am and is filed under Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.