Chronic pain is biochemical, but it’s also psychological, and treatment needs to address how we think and feel about it
While performing a bench press more than a decade ago when I was in medical school, I heard a loud click and felt my whole body go limp, and the weights came crashing down. As pain gripped my entire body in a vise, I was rushed to emergency room where I got intravenous painkillers and was told the pain would eventually disappear.
I’m now a doctor, and our traditional approach in medicine has been to find mechanical and anatomic explanations for chronic pain; I was told from the MRI of my back that I had abnormalities so profound for a young person , I had become the dreaded “interesting case” discussed at the radiology department’s weekly conference. My bones were degenerating, and I had multiple damaged discs in my spine.
This is a really big deal: millions of people in the U.S., alone get MRIs and CT scans for back pain, which is the most common cause of disability around the world. Most of these tests are inappropriate since guidelines now recommend against the routine use of imaging for people with back pain.
One of the major reasons why pain becomes immortal in our bodies is how we feel in our minds. People who fear being in pain or are anxious about it are up to twice as likely to develop chronic pain after undergoing an operation. A study from Finland published this April showed that the presence of psychological distress significantly affected the presence or absence of back pain in those with degenerated spines.
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