by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In a study funded by The National Institute on Aging and the National Cancer Institute, researchers interviewed 94 women whose breast cancer had spread (metastatic) or returned (recurrent) about the stress in their lives. David Spiegel, M.D., one of the study’s...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In previous posts we’ve considered the benefits of stress relief in treatment. Humor can effectively relax patients, allowing them to better handle fear and anxiety. “Nurses find humor to be very beneficial for increasing their patients’ pain threshold, which helps...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
Recent posts have discussed the therapeutic benefits of patient self regulation. Patient self management of stress levels through relaxation response was pioneered in 1976 by Herbert Benson, M.D., head of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at New England Deaconess...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In the last post we began to look the changing role of the Doctor in a health care approach that treated the patient as a whole and meaningful entity. As a person with a life experience that had a bearing upon their existing state of health. We saw that taking a full...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
‘‘If a feeling becomes strong enough, it might become an image. This image can be of help for the mind.’’ (T.S. Elliot) As a doctor, what extent of responsibility do you have in assessing your patients’ situation and exploring possible “prescriptions”? How much of the...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
“Medicine tells us as much about the meaningful performance of healing, suffering and dying as chemical analysis tells us about the aesthetic value of pottery,” Ivan Ilyich in Limits to Medicine. “We confine ourselves to a narrow realm indeed if we exclude from...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
While Steen and Haugli state that treatment programs do exist that approach chronic pain from a psychological point of view, promoting educational pain programs, as well as cognitive understanding of pain and pain models, in order for behaviors to be modified, has...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
In the last couple posts we’ve explored the four dimensions of the biopsychosocial approach to pain. The upshot of the story is that tissue damage alone cannot reveal pain to us and in fact an approach is required that attends to a range of behavioural, psychological...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
In the last post, we started an introduction to the biopsychosocial approach to pain, seeing, in its first dimension, how there was no 1:1 relation between correlation between tissue damage and pain experience. The second dimension is pain perception: a...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
As psychoneuroimmunology has offered a conceptual and biological understanding of the mind-body connections the concept of pain has evolved from purely biomedical to a multi-dimensional understanding. Several authors have categorized management and treatment...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
A 2003 systematic review of antidepressant treatment for chronic back pain concluded they produce only moderate symptom reduction (Staiger et al., 2003). Another recent review concluded that many drugs used for back pain are no more, or only slightly more, effective...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
Animal models for chronic pain are insufficient, despite pioneering work in the late ‘70s to mid-80s. These models have at least confirmed that chronic pain states are biological entities and not just patients’ imagination. Also, they allow for a mechanistic study of...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
In their research, Korff and colleagues have observed a continuum of chronic pain, with no distinct class of chronic pain patients. No clear demarcation distinguished persons with possible or probable chronic pain from those with less significant and enduring pain....
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In the last post we raised the issue of defining chronic pain. One suggestion was to define it in terms of duration. Van Korff & Dunn, in Chronic Pain Reconsidered (2008), argue that “while conceptually appealing, this approach has not produced reliable or valid...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
Patients seeking care for pain want to know whether it is likely to improve or run a chronic course, not just its cause and how it might be relieved and managed. But it is difficult for the doctor to give a clear and reassuring answer. Korff and Dunn, in their book,...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In my last post we saw that, regardless of whether the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) deregulation is activated by physical or psychological triggers, such activation may have significant effects on nociceptive transmission and subsequent pain experiences. This was...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
As covered previously, the autonomic nervous system is comprised of both the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. In chronic stress, the sympathetic system, through several hormonal and neural pathways, maintains a state of chronic stress. While...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
We’ve seen over the last several posts that the standard explanations for pain related to whip last, tending to identify it with lesions and their effects, is increasingly challenged in the research literature. Few insightful studies demonstrate successful...
