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Pain Management:
How do you cope?
Pain management and pain thresholds
 It
is a well-known fact among those working in pain management that
sensitivity to pain actually differs from individual to individual and
from culture to culture. Pain management research has also found that
it is possible to test your pain threshold by holding your hand in
freezing water and measuring how long it takes before it hurts, and
then when it actually becomes unbearable. Most people cannot do this
for more than a couple of minutes. Some of these experiments have
found that men may have higher pain thresholds then women, although
some of these studies may be inconclusive, and may have trouble in
determining whether these differences are actually more socially
determined. Men are sometimes conditioned to appear brave under such
circumstances. Also, some studies have found differences between
cultures. Studies have shown that Mediterranean people for example,
sometimes report pain in response to stimuli that northern Europeans
described as merely unpleasant. These various findings may indicate
that there are biological differences, but also that different
cultures either repress or emphasize the expression of pain. These
cultural and individual differences may have important implications in
the development of effective pain management programs.
Pain Management and effectively dealing with pain:
There are techniques
including meditation, relaxation, hypnosis and behavioral modification
that can reduce an individual’s experience of pain by focusing their
attention on other things. The effect of attention on pain management
has been demonstrated in various studies including a study in which
patients were hypnotized before being operated on without anesthesia.
Under hypnosis, they were told that they would not experience pain and
that the pain would be felt by a "hidden observer". Most of these
patients reported feeling no pain after surgery. When the hypnotist
then addressed the "observer", the observer reported excruciating
pain. These findings suggest that even though we may feel the
sensation of pain, in some conditions we can probably disassociate
from it, which may actually affect the way that it is actually
registered by the brain.
Conversely, fear and
anticipation are believed to actually worsen the sensation of pain.
If an individual has experienced severe pain in a specific experience
in the past, it is believed that the anticipation (or expectation) of
pain may create the expectation (and the actual experiencing of pain)
of suffering in the same way again. The person will probably attend
more closely to their feelings when they are experiencing this
specific situation, and the attention make the new experience even
more painful. In situations like these, psychotherapy may be helpful
to uncover the related unconscious expectations and give the person
the ability to divert their attention from pain stimuli in future
situations.
Refocusing attention
away from the pain stimuli is a pain management technique used by
practitioners of yoga, where they have been found to do such amazing
feats of endurance and pain management as lying on a bed of nails or
walking barefoot across red-hot coals. They have been found to be
able to "retrain" their thinking through meditation and have managed
to reduce the significance of pain signals to their brain in a way
that they are then able to not experience pain in the same way as most
ordinary individuals.
Pain Management through the use of pain medication:
Pain management may
also be effectively handled medically in both the short and long-term,
in addition to understanding the role of expectations, mental state
and psychological makeup. There are now a full array of pain killing
medications available which are frequently found to be very
beneficial. These medications are believed to actually interfere with
pathways of pain to conscious attention or may actually act at the
site of the pain. The most suitable analgesics depend on the nature
and cause of the pain, and also whether pain is severe and
persistent. A doctor's advice and a medical evaluation is always
necessary for the initiation of effective pain management.
Some information from Making the
Most of Your Brain
Paul Susic MA Licensed Psychologist Ph.D. Candidate
(Health Psychology)
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