I read a very interesting article yesterday in WebMD magazine (July/August issue).  The title of the article is Painful Conversation.

What made this article so interesting to me is the fact that the medical profession is giving more credence to the power of the human mind in dealing with pain.  While I have read other articles on mind and medicine, and Mind-Body Therapies for treating pain,  I was happy to see this article in a mainstream magazine read by so many.

This article is written in a question and answer format, with answers given by Scott M. Fishman, MD.  Here is an excerpt from the article:

Q: What new treatments are you particularly excited about?

A: One has to do with teaching patients how to overcome their pain.  We know that the human mind can create pain but that it also has enormous power to take it away; we can teach people skills that were known to Buddhists hundreds of thousands of years ago.  It’s the same focusing technique athletes use to help them improve their performance.  Take Lance Armstrong on that last hill of the Tour De France.  Even though his legs are burning, he can divert his attention from the pain to the goal of performance.  And you can do this with many different techniques.  In this case, he’s used a cognitive technique to change the internal message, “I’m hurting, I better stop” to “I better keep going but perform differently.”  A pain psychologist teaches these techniques.  What I tell my patients is that pain psychologists are really coaches.  They’re not there to diagnose an illness, but to help you learn techniques to use your brain better – just like you would go to a physical therapist to learn techniques to use your body better.  It’s the same thing.

Q: You’re describing the mind/body connection.

A: Yes.  You can’t have pain without a mind so it’s all connected.  My patients are always afraid I’m going to think their pain is all in their head, that they have a mental illness rather than a physical illness, and ignore the real problem.  I try to counsel them that it’s quite the opposite, that any pain requires a mind and you can’t  have pain without a head; so recognizing that opens up all sorts of opportunities to help cope and reduce suffering.

I think of the mind/body approaches as techniques that tap into the body’s own pharmacy.  Things like mindfulness and biofeedback and cognitive behavioral retraining, or guided imagery, even self-hypnosis.  Things like acupuncture and massage.  We don’t know how these things work, but we’re certain they’re helpful.

Scott M. Fishman, MD, American Pain Foundation president and chairman, is Chief of the Division of Pain Medicine and professor of anesthesiology at the University of California, Davis.  He wrote The War on Pain: How Breakthroughs in the New Field of Pain Medicine Are Turning the Tide Against Suffering.  A University of Massachusetts Medical School graduate, he is board certified in internal medicine, psychiatry, and pain and palliative medicine.

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Gina

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