Pain Control

Pain functions primarily as an alarm, working to interrupt all other concerns, goals, desires and motivations and impose a new priority of escaping pain and its causes. Sometimes however pain seems to be untreatable and long-lasting (3 months of longer)- which is termed 'chronic pain'.

If we miss the alarm message of pain for too long, a 'habit of pain' sets in, and may remain even after the original cause may have been resolved. It's almost as if the body now has a pain trauma to deal with.

Research has shown that the experience of pain is very subjective rather than absolute. The experience of pain can be also amplified by unproductive anticipation, expectations and beliefs, for instance focusing on the belief 'this will really hurt and it will be awful and I'll hate it' is going to focus the mind of the experience of pain at the expense of anything else, since what you focus on becomes more of what you get in life. Many doctors and nurses are practiced in distracting their patients from focusing on pain and breaking the 'trance spell' of pain.

Therapy can be used to either address the causes or symptoms of pain, or both. Clinical hypnosis in particular is very effective in both these areas, with proven cases of people having undergone surgical operations without anaesthetic simply be being hypnotised.

In one study in 2004 by Dr.David Oakley from University College London, MRI scans were used to study activity in the brain when people were in 'real pain'; 'hypnotically induced pain' and 'imagined pain'. Although the pain level experienced by participants was similar in all three states, the scan showed that real pain and hypnotically induced pain activated the same area in the brain, whereas pain, which was imagined by participants, did not. Hypnosis, he concluded, is more than, and different from, imagination and alters the same brain areas as the 'real thing'.

Recommended Therapies: CBT Pain management; Clinical Hypnosis.

Pain control Hampstead; Pain Management golders green, kilburn; treatment for chronic pain NW3, NW6 and NW11