Chronic Pain: Body Healed but Brain Signals Distorted
Sunday, January 2, 2011 at 03:33PM Dr. Sean Mackey, an associate professor at Stanford University, was quoted in an article in the February 2008 issue of Best Life entitled "The Psychology of Back Pain".
The standard model of pain-- the same model that is taught in every medical school (and chiropractic school)-- is that you treat the pain by fixing the underlying pathology. We're now beginning to recognize that you can't talk about chronic pain without talking about its psychological aspects. It's a condition in which signals from the body are literally distorted by the brain.
In other words, most doctors will try to diagnose the cause of a person's pain, be it perhaps a muscle strain, osteoarthritis, a ligament tear, an inflamed nerve, a subluxated vertebra, etc. Then after an accurate diagnosis, the appropriate treatment is assigned. For a medical doctor, the fix may be a drug or a surgical procedure. For a chiropractor, the fix is more times than not a spinal adjustment.
However, Dr. Mackey claims that this mechanistic approach to pain elimination may not be effective when the pain is chronic. "Chronic" meaning that even though the injury has healed sufficiently, the pain still persists. For some reason, the brain still perceives pain from an area of previous trauma that should no longer be generating neuroactive chemicals. There should no longer be a significant inflammatory response which triggers a pain cascade up along the central nervous system.
Think of it this way: the brain is still getting "phone calls of pain" but the caller on the other end is no longer there dialing. (Cue the Twilight Zone music.)
So what can we do about the chronic pain ghost signals?
I will write up some suggestions in my next post. Stay tuned.