Everyday pain management ideas

Remember those days in childhood when you challenged a friend to a physical stunt...such as a split...and having conversations about being able to perform such challenges due to being "double jointed"? As it turns out, being "double jointed" is a two-edged sword.  The medical term for this phenomenon is hypermobility.   It appears that many people who have been genetically gifted to perform well in sports and dancing are often more prone to have hypermobility.  Well it's a good thing to be a star athlete or an accomplished ballerina, there may be consequences for those who have this trait. Generalized joint hypermobility (GJH) seems to be a predecessor to a host of chronic pain conditions that develop as age progresses.  Poorly understood, it frequently occurs in a number of persons diagnosed with diseases of connective tissue, such as Marfan syndrome, osteogenesis imperfecta, and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.  Hypermobility syndrome affects approximately 57

The treatment of fibromyalgia is a bit tricky.  For one thing, there are not many pharmaceutical treatments out there.  It's been said by at least one expert that this condition is best managed without medications.  There are many avenues of approach.  Using a combination of techniques, a patient can regain function and quality of life. We've discussed many of the treatment options in this blog in the past. Some of them involve exercise or diet; some others strategies or lifestyle modifications that make living with fibromyalgia a less daunting task. Now comes a small study of a new approach to fibromyalgia treatment: music therapy.  This treatment is one that is best used in addition to other  treatment strategies.  A recent small scale study revealed a statistically significant reduction in pain when the subjects listened to relaxation CDs that contained the sounds of waves and water.  The reduction in pain was seen as early as 14 days into the study! It's go

Problems with headaches are quite common.  For the most minor headaches, a good nap or a dose of an over the counter pain medication will put things right.  In other cases, the problem may be something more serious.  If you suffer from chronic headaches, you may have been told to keep a diary so you can figure out your own personal triggers.  This is a great way to be pro-active about the problem. In some cases, the pain you feel in your head is not really a headache at all...it's a "referred pain." This means that the actual origin of the pain is NOT in your head but is expressed in your head.  For instance, a problem in the upper (cervical) portion of the spine due to injury or extensive desk work can result in a headache.  With that in mind, here are some other headache triggers that you might like to know about.  Hopefully you won't have a headache anytime soon, but if you do it might help you to figure out what's causing pain in your head.

In keeping with the last post...don't forget about the most basic practices along the pain management journey.  As I mentioned in that post, there are so very many complementary and alternative practices one can use to enhance quality of life. Fortunately for all of us, some of them can be implemented without any physical effort whatsoever! Here is one such example of a complementary coping mechanism:practicing positivty!  This is more of a mental exercise  i.e., working on developing the habit of framing our daily thoughts in a positive way.  Here are some examples of how to accomplish this: 1) Do nice things for other people.   Even the little things in life make a difference. No matter what your physical status, this is always possible on some level. It's always possible to compliment people in conversation.  Phone a friend or send a card just to let someone know you're thinking of them. Consider doing volunteer work if you are able. If you happen to be i

Today I'm going to share a link to an editorial from the New York Times.  I thought it important to share... patients see the health care professions from a patient's point of view and don't always see the other side of the coin.  This editorial was written by a physician who describes what's going on in his mind during an office visit with a patient.  It's good to know what's going on in your health care team's mind when you are conversing with them at a visit.  I hope in sharing this your visits with your doctors and other health care practitioners will become more productive! Click here for a link to the article mentioned above.

I've been thinking about the problem of chronic pain for a long time..years, in fact.  I have my own personal chronic pain issues, but today I'm thinking on a broader scale.  The problem of chronic pain is extremely widespread. I have read article after article about how so many people are in pain, how pain is not well managed in chronic and other pain patients, and so on. It's very sad and quite frankly, depressing. Image source: pixabay The problem is...pain is not something that a health care practitioner can gauge in an objective way. To put it another way, when a person says they are in pain, they are in pain.  The only way to really measure pain is to ask the patient about the severity or use one of the pain scales that's based on observation.  On top of that, there are many types of pain.  For example, a patient may present with acute pain or chronic pain.  The pain of a migraine headache is not at all similar to the pain a person might experience pas

If you read a lot of articles about medicine, as I do, you will see many acronyms in the text.  It can be very frustrating when an author uses lots of acronyms in their writings, especially for folks who are just wanting to learn more about a given medical condition.  I have been reading these articles for years and I have to say this newfangled way of writing can be a pain--no pun intended! For that reason, I decided it might be nice to create a post with some of the more common acronyms in texts about pain management.  I will do my best to at least give you a "heads up" about specific acronyms as I use them.  In this way, you will at least have a way to understand what I am talking about! Image source:soft9000.com So, without further ado, here is a short list of common terms you might see in medical writings and doctor's notes regarding pain management issues. Acronym                               Definition CNS