Living with chronic pain is incredibly rough not only on your body, but also on your mind. The persisting pain hinders almost all of your everyday activities. It interrupts your work and the little time that you get to spend doing things for yourself. Chronic pain is defined as pain that persists long after the tissue has healed, usually lasting more than 12 weeks. While acute pain is a normal sensation that let’s us know if there is a possible injury, chronic pain is very different and requires much more attention. In extreme cases, people live with this condition often for months or even years.
Pain serves as a protective mechanism for us as human beings, and we feel pain whenever there’s tissue damage or the potential for tissue damage. When you twist your ankle or cut your finger, your body sends signals back to your brain, which it then perceives as pain. This sensation alarms you that something is wrong and needs your attention. When an injury is healed or when the pain seems to have no obvious connection to an injury, the pain no longer serves a useful purpose. This is chronic pain. Once you experience chronic pain, it’s very difficult to escape, but it’s important to remember that you do have options!
Traditional Treatment for Chronic Pain
Chronic pain management has been a huge challenge for medical professionals. The traditional approach to treatment or management involves increasing doses of pain medications until temporary relief is reached. Pain may be significantly reduced in these instances, but the pain will still always be there when the drugs wear off. The constant need for medications and dose increases becomes a permanent part of someone’s life. It’s a never-ending cycle of medication after medication, always chasing after that pain relief. This harmful cycle often results in drug dependence and addiction. What people living with chronic pain need is an alternative. A treatment option that is healthy, painless and non-invasive that will help them manage the unbearable pain that they must live with every day.
Neurofeedback & Chronic Pain
Chronic pain can be a condition of the brain incorrectly processing signals from the body. As we talked about earlier, when you cut your finger, your body sends signals to your brain, and your brain interprets the pain. However, chronic pain could be an instance where the brain is interpreting pain, but there are actually no painful conditions happening in your body. Another possible explanation could be tension in the body that causes headaches, muscle aches and spasms. In both cases, neurofeedback can help patients train the brain to reinterpret messages from the body, or relax the body.
Because the brain is essentially in charge of everything about pain in your body (how severely it’s perceived and where it is), pain is not an absolute measure and it varies according to what’s going on in your brain. Depending on how the brain interprets incoming signals from your body, it may not be correctly scaled to the actual injury. In order to effectively treat this cycle, we must redefine how the brain interprets nerve impulses and allow the sensitivity to return to normal.
Neurofeedback brain training measures brain activity and helps control central nervous system activity. It is a painless, drugless and non-invasive therapeutic and behavioral technique used in treating or managing a variety of conditions. In this training, you’ll instantaneously have an on-screen visual illustration of your mind at work. This way, we can see behavioral patterns of your brain waves, identify what is going awry in those patterns, and help you retrain those brain waves in order to feel relief or alleviate symptoms through BrainCore therapy.
Recently, BrainCore therapy has been identified has one technique that is able to break the chronic pain cycle, leading to major decreases, or even elimination, of chronic pain. Neurofeedback training focuses on teaching your brain how to regulate itself. With chronic pain, your brain pays too much attention to the internal and external world, and it becomes over-sensitized. Learning to control these brain waves through BrainCore therapy can affect the underlying patterns of behavior, and help return your brain’s pain sensitivity to normal.
BrainCore therapy has been utilized to treat numerous conditions other than chronic pain, such as anxiety, depression, learning disorders, memory loss, insomnia and ADHD. It’s also been used in weight loss programs, peak performance training, and anti-aging treatments. It incorporates some of the latest industry technology and ultimately has been a fascinating and effective treatment alternative to pain management medications and prescriptions. If you’re interested in finding out if BrainCore therapy could help your condition, contact Parkside Health & Wellness Center today for a free personal BrainCore consultation.