Chronic Pain Management Techniques and Strategies from a Clinical Health Psychologist

A doctor’s guide to tools and techniques for taming all kinds of pain. You can understand and manage your intractable pain using the ABC method in this transformative chronic pain book.

Chronic pain is common. Millions suffer from chronic back pain, fibromyalgia, headaches, and many other forms of chronic, intractable pain, and can’t find relief after years of treatment. Chronic pain suffers don’t have to hurt alone. With Restore Your Life from Chronic Pain, manage your chronic pain symptoms—both naturally and with the help of the right doctors.

Learn how to stop the pain. In this chronic pain management book, Clinical Health Psychologist, Dr. Mark B. Weisberg uses the latest discoveries in pain medicine, neuroscience, and psychology to guide readers through ABC integrated pain management for intractable pain. Your life can be yours again—with balance and peace—if you follow his simple advice.

Inside this revolutionary chronic pain book, find:

• Real, validating medical information including how the brain changes with pain
• Holistic and integrated pain management tips for intractable pain that just won’t go away
• The how, why, and who of chronic pain

If you liked chronic pain books such as The Way Out, Pain Free, or Trust Your Gut, you’ll love Restore Your Life From Chronic Pain.

Why I Wrote this Book

I wrote this book for you.

Chronic pain has taken over your life and is holding you captive. Its grip can last for years, no matter how many new kinds of medications and treatments you try, no matter how many specialists you see. Often you find temporary relief, but when the pain returns you become increasingly frustrated and hopeless. You never feel quite well enough to do the things you used to do, and there seems to be no path forward.

It is for you—a person with chronic pain who wants a normal life—that I am writing this book. I want you to know that there is a way out. There is a way to restore your body’s natural capacity to heal and recover. To return to the activities of daily life that are meaningful and important to you.

In other words, to reclaim your life.

Over the last 36 years I have seen countless people—just like you—who find their way out of this suffering and return to their normal lives. The secret to this success is a more comprehensive approach to treating chronic pain, one that integrates the newest scientific findings in psychology, medicine, and neuroscience. I was fortunate to begin my career as a clinical health psychologist in 1984 at a pain clinic devoted to integrative medicine. It is clearly the wave of the future. Our treatments for chronic pain are so effective that we attract patients from neighboring states.

The strength of this holistic treatment is not another medicine or implant, but rather the most powerful healing agent known to modern science: the self-healing powers of the human being. In this book I will explain how you can activate your innate self-healing resources and reclaim your life from the grip of chronic pain.

Your Self-Healing Power

We possess the natural capacity for restoration.

Self-healing capacities are constantly at work in your body, even down to the cellular level. You may not have thought about it, but your cells are constantly at work healing themselves when they are damaged and replacing themselves with newer, healthier cells. For example, when you fracture a bone, almost immediately your body is producing new bone cells to repair the break. When you scrape your knee, the blood clots to stop any bleeding, your immune system activates white blood cells to remove the injured cells, and newer, healthy cells replace the damaged skin. Our body is in a constant state of repairing damage and producing healthier tissue.

Statistically, up to 90% of all illnesses and other health problems resolve without medical intervention. Think of all the times that you, your spouse, or your child had a stomachache, sore throat, headache or common cold that got better without going to a hospital or primary care clinic.

The ABC Method for Healing Chronic Pain

The way to reduce chronic pain by activating your self-healing powers is captured in the acronym ABC, which stands for Awareness, Balancing and Cultivating. The ABC method will teach you new ways to deal with your chronic pain and empower you to break free from the vicious cycle of distress, fear, frustration, and despair.

Awareness

Activating your internal healing abilities starts with awareness. First of all you need to pay attention to the sensations of your body, because this is your body’s way of trying to tell you something. Its wisdom is lost if you don’t listen to it. Focusing your awareness sounds easy but it can be quite tricky and elusive. That’s because we all have a natural tendency to avoid things that feel painful, and many chronic pain sufferers ignore their pain habitually, They mask it with medications, or distract themselves with mindless activities or social media to divert their awareness from bodily sensations.

The art of Awareness entails learning effective strategies to become aware of your emotions and thoughts, as well as your physical sensations. Only then can you tune in to your body’s natural capacity to change and heal. Awareness is a prerequisite for the skills that follow.

Balancing

Balance has been a central concept in medicine and healing for centuries. The idea is that we are complex creatures with multiple processes going on at the same time. These functions need to be balanced for us to be healthy. The goal is to achieve equilibrium. Our nervous system maintains a balance between its energizing influence and its calming influence. When we move, some muscles contract while others lengthen and relax. Our immune system does a constant balancing act between activating cells that attack germs, and cells that quiet down the attack. Every day our lives seek a balance between activity and rest or social interaction and solitude. And we all know we need a balanced diet.

From an integrative medicine perspective, health and healing result from establishing balance on multiple levels. The Art of Balancing involves learning various ways to support your mind and body with that much needed equilibrium.

Cultivating

Activating your self-healing powers—your capacity for restoration—doesn’t happen by itself, a lesson we learned from epigenetics. Sustained pain relief requires cultivating new habits. This ongoing effort to activate your self-healing resources leads you to the rewards you seek—restoration, resilience, and healing. We possess the potential for these kinds of positive changes, and cultivating proper self-care habits will trigger the most powerful pain-relieving systems in the body. The Cultivation section of the book will show you how to do exactly that.

A key component of Cultivation is the notion of a Resource Tank, your reservoir of skills, strategies and energy that ensures quicker healing. You will learn how to keep your resource tank full by acquiring such special skills as self-hypnosis and Limbic Retraining—a technique that uses your mind to calm your brain.

The ABC guided program to reduce chronic pain is an entirely different approach than the quick fix of medications, trigger point injections, and implantable pain pumps. True primary care is not what your physician does for you but rather what you do for yourself. You are in the driver’s seat, and this book will guide you on your journey.