שינוי פנימי עשוי לסייע להתמודד עם כאבים כרוניים

Now Dr. Howard Schubiner, a world expert in pain management and mind-body medicine, says chronic pain in some cases can actually be unlearned. In this preview of Vital Signs, host Brendan Falun explores this form of treatment which has entered the celebrity circle with the doctor himself. In former Fox journalist John Stossel's case, feelings of rage were at the heart of his chronic back pain. Stossel is one of a string of celebrities including Larry David, Jimmy Kimmel and Howard Stern outspoken about their back pain relief via a mind-body approach. In 1999, Stossel reported on his experience in a 2020 report. Here we see him being counseled by Dr. John Sarno. So I'm in such a rage about something that I'm making myself suffer. But don't you see, your brain actually thinks it's doing you a favor by doing this, by distracting me from what I really don't want to think about. Exactly. Stossel had suffered back pain for 15 years before learning of the work that Dr. Sarno was doing. He said that after seeing Sarno and reading one of his books, his back pain got immediately better for a while. Six months later the pain came back. Realizing that he hadn't followed Sarno's suggestions, which included going to one of his seminars, Stossel finally went and the pain got better again. Back around 2011, he said that he'd been virtually pain-free for 10 years. The idea that repressed emotion like rage can cause back pain reminded me of how psychological trauma can play out as very real physical symptoms, as seen especially in PTSD, where it can manifest as things like stomach upsets, skin rashes and chest pain. And just as mind-body medicine for pain appears to work at juncture of memory, emotion and the central nervous system, one of the most effective treatments for PTSD, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy, or EMDR, also deals with memory, emotion and can lower the stress response of the central nervous system. With EMDR, the patient's focus is brought to their trauma memory at the same time they're given bilateral stimulation. This is often in the form of back-and-forth eye movements directed by the therapist. Exactly how EMDR is able to bring about such a change is still something of a mystery, so I was interested to hear Dr. Schubiner's take on how it might work. Childhood trauma causes the brain to be set in a more sensitized fashion, a more high alert fashion as people go through life. If someone has been severely hurt or criticized or betrayed or abandoned in their childhood, and then later in life they get criticized or abandoned, then their brain is much more likely to turn on some kind of danger signal. I was greeting a military veteran a while ago, and he thought that his PTSD came from being in the military because of the things that he saw there and did there, which was true. But it was also because of the childhood issues that he had in his life growing up, which sensitized his brain and made him more likely to develop PTSD later in life. The treatment models that EMDR is, and the treatment model Mark Lumley and I have developed called Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy, and the expressive writing that you talked about earlier, and there's a whole bunch of other psychological treatments for PTSD, all of them work to rewire the brain, reprogram the brain to not only view but also experience the events of their past in a less traumatic way, in a way which is more kind to themselves, loving to themselves, in a way that helps to empower themselves to be less affected by the events that happen, that you can't change the events. But what's interesting about PTSD is that it's based on memory, because how do we know what happened in our past? It's our memory. Memory changes all the time, and so our Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy is based on memory reconsolidation and these other treatments you talked about as well. So the point is that the brain is neuroplastic, it's always changing, and it can change in a positive direction as we do these kinds of therapies. To see that full interview and others on how to optimize health, go to ept.ms forward slash Vital Signs. Vital Signs offers general health information not intended as medical diagnosis or advice. Please consult your doctor before undertaking a new health regimen.