Reddit reviews Pain Chronicles

This is a big issue with SO MANY points to argue, you could write books, and many have.

So I'm just going to keep to a small subset of this big issue that I have personal experience. People who suffer chronic pain, and this pain could be from a palliative state such as terminal bone cancer, or just someone who on a daily basis and don't receive proper pain management... kill themselves, a lot.

Living and working in the family business (funeral home) back before my current career, I saw this a lot. It used to piss my father off to no extent when patients in end stage, horribly painful cancer were not given adequate pain medication, it was almost like they didn't want this guy who was gonna die in 4 days to get addicted to opioids, it make no sense.

So where am I going with this? People underestimate the effect of how constant pain ravages your mind and body, they just don't have a true understanding of it.

So if someone is in palliative care and the most extreme methods of pain management are failing, and they wish assisted suicide, then absolutely yes.

I'd also recommend a great book to truly attempt to understand the personal hell of pain:

The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering

Melanie Thernstrom

http://www.amazon.com/Pain-Chronicles-Mysteries-Prayers-Suffering/dp/0312573073/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425919402&sr=8-1&keywords=Melanie+Thernstrom

>How can you relieve severe pain for a body part that is no longer there?

With mirror therapy! I first heard of it when I read The Pain Chronicles, which is an excellent book if you're interested in the subject.

I’m sorry you have issues with pain. I also deal with pain on a daily basis. But this is not “my bullshit theory”, there is tons of valid and repeatable research on this topic. I’ll include some links at the end.

The difference between his case and someone more susceptible is how long he’s had his issues. He’s already proven his chiropractor wrong, so the chiropractor holds much less sway.

For people who see their first doctor after an acute injury, they are totally unaware of how the injury will progress. When the doctor tells them “I’ve got some bad news for you bud.. this is going to be something you’ll probably have to deal with for the rest of your life”, this is what creates the problem. It instigates a cascade of effects where the person is afraid of injuring it further, thus they become less physically active, which causes more problems over time (muscle wasting, decreased blood flow to injury).

Secondly, tissue damage does not necessarily correlate with pain perception. The perception of pain is largely influenced by how great a threat we believe the injury to pose to our long-term welfare. The brain’s job is to protect your body, so when you are injured, you automatically become more attuned to the injured area. Your neural circuitry involved in vigilance toward that region of your body becomes more active, strengthening their synaptic connections. You may have increased cortisol. You’ll engage in sickness behavior such as rest and social isolation (of which the latter, notably, may also exacerbate perception of pain, as the brain regions involved in social rejection and inclusion also play roles in physical pain perception as well) Source

Usually, as the injury heals, the neural circuits that were activated in response to the acute pain will lose the strength of their synaptic connections, and you pay less attention to the pain. However, if you believe that the injury will will worsen over time, not improve, then your anxiety is only strengthening the connections within that circuitry. Your brain still regards it as a handicap. The pain signal originating from the damaged tissue may have slowed or ceased altogether, but the subsequent reorganization of neural circuits remains. Thus, in a way, your brain is “hallucinating” a higher degree of pain than it is actually being signaled from the damaged tissue. This is thought to also be the mechanism behind phantom limb syndrome (check out Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran’s remapping hypothesis.

I also deal with chronic pain, and I’m by no means saying it’s all in our mind. There is, however, substantial evidence that our attitude has a great influence on the outcome. I suggest reading Melanie Thernstrom’s book The Pain Chronicles, which goes pretty deep into the restructuring of the brain that occurs with chronic pain.

Here’s another paper that goes into the relationship between anxiety and pain perception.