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    The Language of Pain: Fast Forward Your Recovery to Stop Hurting
    The Language of Pain: Fast Forward Your Recovery to Stop Hurting
    The Language of Pain: Fast Forward Your Recovery to Stop Hurting
    Ebook196 pages4 hours

    The Language of Pain: Fast Forward Your Recovery to Stop Hurting

    By Dr. Trevor Campbell

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    About this ebook

    For people dealing with chronic pain, just getting through the day can be a trial. In many cases, your only treatment options are opioids and other analgesics and a puzzling choice of self-help options. But there's a way to reduce your suffering that isn't focused on drugs or expensive pain management programs.

    In The Language of Pain, Dr. Trevor Campbell provides practical tools for alleviating your agony. Based on years of experience, Dr. Campbell's approach builds a solid foundation for success and targets the behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes that trigger the specific brain centers that generate pain as a continuous threat signal. He offers clear recommendations for simple, effective actions to improve your quality of life and dramatically lessen the physical distress you endure every day.

    At last, there is an accessible and durable evidence-based, non-pharmacological approach for reducing your pain and getting back to living!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateMar 29, 2019
    ISBN9781544514031

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      Book preview

      The Language of Pain - Dr. Trevor Campbell

      ]>

      ]>

      Copyright © 2019 Trevor Campbell

      All rights reserved.

      ISBN: 978-1-5445-1403-1

      ]>

      To my patients

      who showed me the sorrows closest to their hearts

      and taught me the language of pain.

      To my mentors and teachers

      for choosing to show rather than tell.

      ]>

      Contents

      Disclaimer

      Introduction

      Part I: The Treatment Contract

      1. What Is Chronic Pain?

      2. What Is the Goal of Chronic Pain Treatment?

      3. The Pain Narrative

      Part II: The Recovery Foundation

      4. Finding Meaning

      5. Accepting Pain

      6. Changing Expectations

      Part III: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

      7. Lifting Mood by Challenging Thoughts

      Part IV: The Upward Spiral

      8. Activate Your Life by Modifying Behavior

      9. Finding an Internal Center of Control

      10. Enhancing Quality of Life

      Part V: Exit Strategies

      11. Escaping Acute Pain

      12. Warding Off Long-Term Pain

      13. Finding a More Compelling Script

      Conclusion

      Summary

      Bibliography

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      ]>

      Disclaimer

      This is important. Please read.

      This book is not intended as a replacement for medical advice or consultation. This publication is a reference guide only and cannot be relied upon for specific and individual medical advice or treatments. Your treating physicians know your history best and treat you on an ongoing basis. The options presented here are mostly based on sound and widely accepted practices at the time of publication. Readers and followers of any of the directions contained in this publication should first consult with their treating physicians before undertaking any of the suggested treatment options in this publication.

      If any of the activities and disciplines mentioned in this book cause any symptoms of any kind, including increased pain, anxiety, or distress, the activity should be discontinued at once and you should also seek professional medical advice immediately. The author disclaims all liability and legal responsibility, howsoever caused, for reliance on the information contained in or referenced by this publication.

      ]>

      Introduction

      I first met Renée, a forty-seven-year-old secretary almost eight years after her injury. The accident itself was nothing dramatic—she had fallen about two feet off a small ladder and hurt her left knee. It was twisted and strained, and she had torn the knee cartilage, so she required surgery. She took care of that in short order, and her surgeon declared the procedure a success.

      Months after the surgery, however, Renée was still experiencing pain. In fact, contrary to her expectations, the pain was getting worse. At this point in her supposed recovery process, Renée reluctantly agreed to attend a multidisciplinary pain management program, but it proved too difficult for her to maintain. She described the program as being too heavy for her, which led her to walk out after only two weeks. Later on, she realized her early departure from the program had been a mistake. She still had horrible pain months later, which was why she was talking to me.

      She wasn’t particularly pleased with my line of questioning at first, though. In fact, she became quite agitated when I asked about depression symptoms. Below is my recollection more or less of our dialogue:

      Forget depression, she replied. How about extremely angry, as in ripping someone’s head off!

      I had heard similar responses before, so I was ready with my next question.

      What has made you most angry? I asked.

      She looked up at me. You got a couple of hours, Doc?

      Let’s at least make a start, I suggested.

      I’m angry because every second doc tells me that the pain is in my head when I only ever feel it in my knee, she explained. And then they go on and on about how I must educate myself and change. Her face flushed. Well, I’ve done that already; I’ve gone from terrible to way worse!

      She could no longer hold the tears back.

      What have you learned, Renée?

      She shrugged. Not a lot. I end up going back online, but it’s depressing.

      Have you read any books or manuals?

      Quite a few, actually—at least I tried to.

      How did that work for you?

      She sighed. The advice is always a pile of stuff that you have to do every day, like an extra job. No, two jobs! Don’t they realize that I have zero energy, that I barely sleep at night, that my life is wrecked, and that, yes, I am depressed? Again, she wiped her cheek. All those to-do lists, brain chemicals, scales, and diaries. Forget it!

      I have heard stories like Renée’s too many times. People in chronic pain are doing their best just to get through the day. They need help, not more to-do lists crammed with seemingly random tasks. That’s why I wrote this book—to give people in chronic pain something simple that they can use to get better.

      Who Is This Book For?

      Are you, like Renée, looking for a way to reduce chronic pain that isn’t heavily focused on drugs or expensive pain management programs? If you have chronic noncancer pain and are concerned about the potential drawbacks of those approaches, including addiction, unpleasant side effects, or lack of long-term success, this book is for you. It’s time to learn a new approach that reduces your pain both now and over the long term. My approach facilitates recovery by targeting the specific generators of chronic pain (mostly behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes) that trigger certain centers in the brain to believe that you are under constant threat, setting off the alarm signal in the form of ongoing pain.

      The Language of Pain is not like other books that may overwhelm readers with endless details of anatomy and physiology. Those details can be fascinating, and we’ll certainly address the ways the body deals with pain in these pages, but as a physician with years of experience working with chronic pain patients, I realize that learning what often seems like trivia to someone in distress—neurotransmitters and which parts of the brain light up on an imaging, for instance—has limited usefulness in a person’s everyday life, even though we know that these important areas of research will certainly yield more major insights and breakthroughs in the future. If neuro-imaging, the study of neurotransmitters, and elaborate chemical interventions are your thing, then this book is not for you. If you want to discover practical tools for reclaiming your life, read on.

      Instead of filling these pages with scientific jargon, I will offer images and stories to illustrate where the real problems lie and identify where you should focus your efforts. Then I will help you build a foundation that you can take forward into your own pain management program—clear, simple recommendations for actions you can take. I will never push you to strive for perfection by requiring you to do everything under the sun to alleviate your chronic pain. Instead, I will show you how to get more bang for your buck by completing the most helpful 20 percent of tasks while receiving 80 percent of the benefit.

      The 80/20 rule, first described by Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who was studying land ownership in his native country a century ago, applies to many types of activity and endeavor, where 20 percent of the efforts curiously account for 80 percent of the results or success. For example, in a company sales team, often about one-fifth of the sales force will bring in approximately four-fifths of the sales. Similarly, a small group of customers frequenting a supermarket will account for a much higher percentage of the complaints made to customer service. (It is important to realize that these proportions are approximations and need not be exactly 80/20.)

      Using the Pareto principle helps us keep it simple so that after a couple of months, the insights in this book will live in your head, and you won’t have to drag a pain manual around with you all the time.

      Why Should You Listen to Me?

      If you have chronic noncancer pain and are underwhelmed with your progress over the years, this book could well be for you. Although the concepts presented are intended to reach everyday readers, they are based on solid science and extensive professional experience as a clinician. I have worked in the trenches with chronic pain patients in both multidisciplinary pain management programs and programs that help chronic pain patients reduce and eliminate their opioid use. I have also consulted the robust scientific literature available on various aspects of chronic pain and will share many of those findings here. A bibliography of scientific studies, medical journal editorials, and other documentation is provided at the end of the book. Additionally, I have been a family physician over the past thirty-seven years and have had a lifelong interest in various types of counseling, the power of thought, and daily due diligence in the prevention and treatment of chronic disease.

      My training in South Africa taught me that not every country has a pain-related opioid prescription crisis and that there are other, more successful approaches to treating chronic pain. I became more involved in chronic pain while in North America and was a medical director for a well-known pain management provider in western Canada. For the last six years, I have worked in the field of disability medicine and have, together with a team, helped bring hundreds of patients with chronic pain and high-dose opioids to a safer place.

      I know that I can help you, too.

      ]>

      Part I

      Part I: The Treatment Contract

      ]>

      Chapter One

      1. What Is Chronic Pain?

      First, a bit of bad news: developing an understanding of how the body’s pain circuitry works in chronic pain is no easy task. Not only is the anatomy, physiology, and neurology complex, but there are also several theoretical models of chronic pain—even the experts cannot agree on exactly how the chronic pain phenomenon unfolds.

      At best, the explanations for chronic pain that many family physicians offer to most patients are not well understood, in my experience. At worst, they are confusing to the point that patients simply don’t have a good idea of what is going on. More distressingly, quite a number of patients enter a pain management program claiming they have not been given any explanation at all. Some patients report that their perception of the advice they have received seems like an overwhelming tangle of factoids, accompanied by what looks like a near-impossible-to-enact treatment plan, given the low energy level, sleep dysregulation, depression, and anxiety they usually face. It is challenging to develop an interest in and remain motivated by any treatment plan when you have little understanding and insight.

      You probably have no wish or will to wade through the various theories and models that have been generated in attempts to explain the phenomenon of chronic pain; if you are interested, you could explore gate theory, the pain avoidance model, the

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