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Healing Pain
By Michela | June 30, 2009
One of Dahn Yoga founder Ilchi Lee’s awakenings after a rigorous 21-days of fasting and meditation was: “My body is not me, but mine.” Inherent in this statement is that we are more than our bodies. We can transcend our physical form, and don’t need to suffer from mental anguish when our bodies are sick, injured and in pain. (At the same time, it implies we are also responsible for our bodies.
Recently I read a blog post by Jonah Lehrer on ScienceBlogs.com that talks about scientific research and doctors who have shown that the way we think of pain, especially back pain in this case, affects how much pain we experience and how we manage it. As I was reading it, the post reminded me of Dahn Yoga’s approach to pain.
This approach recognizes that body and mind are connected and that pain is merely a signal to the brain that something is not right. In terms of Eastern medicine, a something not right shows up as a blockage in the meridian channels that energy flows through in the body. And that something not right did not necessarily start as something physical, but may be an emotional or mental issue that eventually manifested itself in our bodies.
In Dahn Yoga classes, if we feel pain while doing a stretch or holding a posture, we’re instructed to focus on that pain and breathe through it, releasing stagnant energy out through our mouth. With our mind’s focus there and the help of the meridian exercise we are doing, the energy blockage moves and opens, releasing the pain and healing the underlying problem as well.
The blog post talks about a similar effect with cognitive behavioral therapy and biofeedback. These treatments have been shown not only to reduce stress or improve overall quality of life, but also to reduce or eliminate people’s back pain, something most doctors only think of as a physical condition. It seems that, with the research being done on back pain, the interconnection between the psychological and physical aspects of health are being recognized more widely.
Here is an excerpt from the post that talks about this point in more detail:
Robert Kerns has been studying the psychology of pain for thirty years. He’s a Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University, and the National Program Director for Pain Management at the Veterans Health Administration. When Kerns was in graduate school, back in the late 1970’s, he happened to treat a patient with terrible back pain as a result of kidney disease. Even though this patient had a serious physical condition, Kerns noticed that psychological therapy helped her cope with the pain.
“That’s when I began to appreciate that a person’s thinking could really affect their pain experience,” he says. “Our chronic pain isn’t beyond our control.” At the time, there was little hard evidence to support such mental interventions. Treating chronic pain with psychological therapy was like treating cancer with a poem: the best thing most doctors could say about it was that it would do no harm. But few doctors expected it to actually help. Pain, after all, was a medical condition. Therapy was just words.
But the words work. Kerns’ most recent study, published in January 2007 in Health Psychology, is also his most definitive. It’s a meta-analysis of twenty-two trials that looked at the effectiveness of psychological treatments for patients with chronic lower back pain. The statistics were complicated, but the results were clear: psychological treatments made the pain go away. Patients with chronic back pain could reduce their suffering by learning how to think differently about their pain. Benson Hoffman, a clinical associate at Duke University and co-author on the study, was surprised by the robustness of the data. “Going into the study,” Hoffman says, “I thought that psychological interventions would probably increase a patient’s quality of life, but not actually reduce their pain. But my hypothesis was wrong. These psychological treatments reduced the pain more than anything else.” According to the meta-analysis, the two most effective psychological interventions were cognitive behavioral therapy and “self-regulatory therapies,” like biofeedback. Cognitive behavioral therapy is a popular form of talk therapy that teaches patients how to adopt a problem-solving approach to their pain.
The simple premise of the treatment is that we are capable of controlling our own thoughts, emotions and experiences. Therapists teach patients specific mental exercises such as keeping a journal, or practicing relaxation techniques that help them manage their negative feelings and alleviate their suffering. The goal of the therapy is to re-train the brain, so that the cycle of pain is stopped. Self-regulatory therapies, on the other hand, show people how to take back control of their body. By giving patients information about their own internal processes such as readouts of their blood pressure and brain waves the therapy teaches them how to modulate these processes. The mind needn’t be a slave to the flesh.
“Many patients with chronic back pain develop a deep sense of hopelessness,” Kerns says. “These therapies show them that they can develop everday strategies that make them feel better. I think one of the things that modern medicine has forgotten is that it’s important to treat the whole person, and this means addressing both the physical and psychological aspects of the pain. When it comes to back pain, just fixing a ‘broken’ body part often isn’t enough.
“Chronic stress is another important risk factor for chronic pain. One back surgeon, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of offending his patients, said that he’s seen several men develop lower back pain shortly after getting engaged. “Weddings are stressors,” he says, “and that stress can exacerbate the experience of pain.” Intriguing clues are beginning to emerge about how, exactly, stress might modulate pain. Joyce Deleo, a neuroscientist at Dartmouth, has discovered that chronic pain is often triggered by a response from the immune system. When Deleo bred mice that were missing a specific type of immune receptor, the mice proved much less vulnerable to the lingering effects of pain. Of course, it’s long been recognized that bouts of stress can profoundly alter the nature of our immune response. “I think the medical community is finally beginning to understand just how complicated the phenomenon of chronic pain is,” Carragee says. “There are so many different psychological variables that can amplify and distort our experience of pain. You can’t just wield a scalpel and make it go away.”