by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In the last several posts, from a variety of angles, we’ve examined the mind-body dimensions of treatment for pain, seeing how it is essential to treat the trauma rather than the symptoms. This has involved treating the body as a carrier of meaning, whose history...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In my last post I raised the issue of fear as a meaning invested in the body and its symptoms. The correlation of the body part with the fearful memory deeply connects and acknowledges the fear. Making explicit the mind-body connection helps release the traumatic...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In recent posts we’ve been discussing the value of a paradigm shift to thinking of the body as a carrier of meaning and the health care opportunities it affords. As one commentator observed: finding ways for patients to shift their perspectives, to achieve “…a shift...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In the last post we looked at the research on the human body as a carrier of meaning, with a discernible history with lessons to teach us. Let’s look at this idea more closely. The work of Steen et al., “Generalized chronic musculoskeletal pain as a rational reaction...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In recent posts we’ve been considering the therapeutic benefits to dealing with stress as a strategy for addressing pain and cancer. But what is the story behind these concerns with stress? Researchers have long questioned why some people are resilient to stress while...
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 | 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...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In the last couple posts we’ve seen how mechanical and structural explanations for persistent whip lash pain don’t stand up as well as does subjective and emotional explanations. It turns out than even muscular explanations are not as compelling as many might assume...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
I will never forget the patient I saw in Stouffville, Ontario, who was told by her chiropractor that the pain and lack of motion in her neck had to do with the osteophytes that had amassed on her cervical spine. After two series of 30 treatments, she came to see me...
