Forget Fear

Have you ever felt pain of an old injury even though there is no obvious reason why? It’s not just your imagination and perhaps researchers have found that there is a rational explanation. Recently there has been a discovery of a direct link between pain and memory. Constant, reoccurring or intense pain may result from a central nervous system that “remembers” painful sensations for an unusually long time, University of Florida researchers have discovered.These findings provide evidence that indicate some people have an abnormal ability to ‘remember pain’ from previous traumas. Because when we injure ourselves the nervous system becomes sensitised, encoding the link between the injury and the pain. This learning is important as it helps to protect the body from future or similar injuries. Then there's a healing process, and usually the ‘pain memory’ goes away. But if it doesn’t the resulting memory can manifest itself in phantom pain that can linger long after the healing of the original trauma.The fact that the body stores a memory of previous pain is a discovery that might well lead to a whole new approach to treating chronic pain. It may provide a foundation for developing alternative therapies that treat the memory storage mechanism, which creates pain in muscles and soft tissues throughout the body, causing sleep problems and fatigue.One example of this ‘pain memory’ is the research by UF scientists to shed light on the puzzling disease fibromyalgia. It has no known cause. Existing treatments provide little to no relief for the chronic pain associated with it. Traditional blood tests and scans do not detect any anomalies associated with the disease. All of which has led many physicians to question if the pain is real. Real or not, the American College of Rheumatology estimates that 6 million Americans suffer from fibroyalgia. The majority of which are women between the ages of eighteen and forty. Why do painkillers have little effect on some types of pain? Professor Rolf Treede from the Institute of Physiology and Pathophysiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University suggests that “the discovery of the link between pain and memory should result in the development of a new type of drug providing alternatives to the traditional painkillers.” It’s obvious that a different approach to pain relief is needed because as Professor Treede says “the concern with the standard drugs that treat pain, like opiates, is that you are reducing this normal physiological function of the pain system, and you're endangering the cell. So if you would not feel injury anymore, your normal life is strongly impeded. So what you need is something that would treat the pathological pain and not the normal pain.”That’s why many people with this type of ‘pathological pain’ are turning to alternative treatments that heal the psychological aspects of the problem and reduce the capacity of the central nervous system to store ‘pain memory’. Perhaps this is why people who use relaxation techniques to reduce anxiety or stress also report reductions in pain levels.Although an effective relaxation technique many people are wary of hypnosis, which is why instead many turn to suggestion audios that mix a combination of relaxing music, state changing ‘binaural beats’ and therapeutic affirmations. Want to experience the effect of this type of relaxation technique? Well you can because some online therapy sites like virtual-therapist.com have samples of these alternative therapies that you can listen to online.In conclusion, there seems little doubt that ‘pain memory’ may well be the cause of much unresolved suffering. Make no mistake, this is real pain. It is not imagined, because the trigger is within the central nervous system. But this type of pain can be significantly reduced or totally alleviated by using techniques better recognised for improving mental wellbeing rather than resorting to chemical painkillers.

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