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Chronic Pain
HealWithin offers Hypnotherapy Treatments for: Asthma, Cancer, Chronic Pain, Depression, Fears/Anxiety, Hypnosis for Childbirth, IBS, Infertility, Insomnia, Menopause, Stop Smoking, Self Esteem, Weight Loss, and Stress
Did you know Chronic pain is different from Acute pain?
There are two types of pain, acute and chronic.
Acute pain is familiar to most of us: You feel it when you cut yourself, twist an ankle, or suffer a burn. This kind of pain is a biologically useful symptom that warns of actual or potential physical damage so you can seek treatment or avoid further harm.
(“Acute” in medical terms means only that it has a rapid onset and doesn’t last long.) Acute pain has an identifiable cause and a limited duration. On the other hand, the chronic pain felt with problems such as low back pain or fibromyalgia persists continuously or intermittently for months or years—long past the time when it might be biologically useful—and it doesn’t subside with time or rest.
People vary tremendously in their perception of pain.
It’s now accepted that pain is a subjective experience influenced by memory, expectation, stress, fatigue, environment, and genetic programming. This explains why the intensity of a person’s pain may have no relationship to the severity of the injury—because it’s not just the injury itself that causes pain, but also the emotional and learned response to it. There may even be genetic and gender-based differences in pain sensitivity and response to pain medications that are hard-wired into us. These observations have taught us that pain-management programs must be customized for the patient.
Some pain may be here to stay. Coping with the pain is in your hands.
Did you know parts of your body such as muscle, have memory?
Sometimes chronic pain has no obvious physical cause. The original wound may have healed, or there may never have been an injury as severe as the pain would suggest. Also, the brain can feel pain even without any input from the body. For example, an amputee may feel pain in a missing limb. The sensation of physical injury clearly cannot come from a body part that is not there, so it must originate in the brain. It appears that the brain can even cause pain by sending signals that tell nerve endings to release inflammatory chemicals. Chronic pain syndromes can actually change the way the body’s pain-sensing mechanisms and its natural pain-relieving systems operate, so the nervous system becomes more sensitive to pain and less receptive to the brain chemicals that moderate or turn off pain. This “remodeling” of the nervous system is one reason that prominent pain researchers now believe chronic pain should be considered an actual disease of the nervous system.
Chronic pain affects your whole body.
In the cascade of events involved in chronic pain, nerves may sprout sensitive new endings, receptors for natural compounds that alleviate pain may deaden, and pain mechanisms may be triggered by stimuli as benign as a cool breeze. Eventually the whole body may be affected if the depression and anxiety that often accompany chronic pain cause abnormal levels of certain neurotransmitters, chemical messengers that can influence all organ systems. Therefore, a program to manage chronic pain has to work on many fronts.
Inadequately treated pain can lead to chronic pain.
Treating acute pain early and aggressively with painkillers and other therapies can slow the progression of irreversible changes in the nervous system and also limit the creation of long-lasting pain memories that can intensify future responses to painful stimuli.
It is a known fact that Hypnosis assists patients in obtaining deep levels of relaxation, which often leads to more peaceful sleep, increased energy, and a diminished experience of pain.
Contact us at: (818) 551-1501 to help you feel better!
