by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In the last post we saw the powerful affects of priming individuals as a means to reduce the experience of pain. This confirms our conviction that mindfulness is an essential component in the effective treatment of pain and trauma. The flip side of the matter can be...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In contrast to the more empowered approach, discussed over the last several posts, of viewing a patient’s pain as “one of their symptoms,” a pathophysiological approach to pain focuses on pain relief as the primary objective. The choice of intervention is usually...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
In the last post we started to explore the role of the brain in pain and recovery. An especially powerful aspect of this is the role of perception. A 2011 study established neural evidence for the brain’s role in controlling motor output (Tanaka et al., 2011, p.38)....
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In the last several posts, from a variety of angles, we’ve examined the mind-body dimensions of treatment for pain, seeing how it is essential to treat the trauma rather than the symptoms. This has involved treating the body as a carrier of meaning, whose history...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In recent posts we’ve been considering the therapeutic benefits to dealing with stress as a strategy for addressing pain and cancer. But what is the story behind these concerns with stress? Researchers have long questioned why some people are resilient to stress while...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In previous posts we’ve considered the benefits of stress relief in treatment. Humor can effectively relax patients, allowing them to better handle fear and anxiety. “Nurses find humor to be very beneficial for increasing their patients’ pain threshold, which helps...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
In the last post, we started an introduction to the biopsychosocial approach to pain, seeing, in its first dimension, how there was no 1:1 relation between correlation between tissue damage and pain experience. The second dimension is pain perception: a...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
As psychoneuroimmunology has offered a conceptual and biological understanding of the mind-body connections the concept of pain has evolved from purely biomedical to a multi-dimensional understanding. Several authors have categorized management and treatment...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
In their research, Korff and colleagues have observed a continuum of chronic pain, with no distinct class of chronic pain patients. No clear demarcation distinguished persons with possible or probable chronic pain from those with less significant and enduring pain....
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
Patients seeking care for pain want to know whether it is likely to improve or run a chronic course, not just its cause and how it might be relieved and managed. But it is difficult for the doctor to give a clear and reassuring answer. Korff and Dunn, in their book,...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In my last post we saw that, regardless of whether the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) deregulation is activated by physical or psychological triggers, such activation may have significant effects on nociceptive transmission and subsequent pain experiences. This was...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
As covered previously, the autonomic nervous system is comprised of both the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. In chronic stress, the sympathetic system, through several hormonal and neural pathways, maintains a state of chronic stress. While...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
We’ve seen over the last several posts that the standard explanations for pain related to whip last, tending to identify it with lesions and their effects, is increasingly challenged in the research literature. Few insightful studies demonstrate successful...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In the last couple posts we’ve seen how mechanical and structural explanations for persistent whip lash pain don’t stand up as well as does subjective and emotional explanations. It turns out than even muscular explanations are not as compelling as many might assume...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In my last post we looked at the brain science on pain. Among the facts we observed was that there were two distinct pathways associated with pain. I have a couple more thoughts to add on the brain science front before we turn to a consideration of what this means for...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
The pathways for pain transmission are complex. Generally, nociceptive information (pain-info) reports external and internal representation of the body’s physiological condition through two different components: The sensory-discriminative component, transmitted...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
In the current series of posts I’ll be discussing the treatment of pain and how this creates difficulties for effective assessment, using the SOAP method for doctors’ diagnosis. It seems though that before becoming fully immersed in these discussions, it would be...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
In my last post I discussed the difficulties pain posed for effective assessment, given its subjective character, and how addressing pain first was the prime directive in my practice. Perhaps the most effective way of addressing the multifactorial,...
