These are the people who will almost certainly be helped by this article.

CHRONIC LOWER BACK PAIN REQUIRES A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT APPROACH

Back pain can be considered to be "chronic pain" when it persists over a long time without improvement, despite following treatment recommendations. The fascinating thing about chronic pain is that it has little or nothing to do with actual damage or injury.

If you were presented with a number of spine x-rays for example, and you were asked to guess which people had the most pain, you'd be wrong in most cases because people with no damage can have extreme pain, and people with a lot of damage might be completely unaware that there is anything wrong.

The reason for this is that chronic pain is generated in the brain rather than in the body, and we can prove this very easily just by looking at MRI scans of the working brain. In fact functional magnetic resonance imaging proves conclusively that chronic pain is just the same as emotional pain! How shocking is that!

This might sound even more hopeless but when we see true chronic pain cases with this kind of pattern we rub our hands together with delight because we know we can help! The information in this article could be the best news you've had for a long time!

YOUR CHRONIC BACK PAIN - 7 STEPS TO ELIMINATION

Step 1: Reduce your stress. A jangled nervous system produces far more pain than a quiet, calm one, simply because it's so reactive. Identify all the factors of your life that give you stress, the people, the places, the things, the situations, and make sure you get help to resolve them. Your nervous system will thank you for it!

Step 2: Consider how your emotions might play a role in your pain. Without doubt, negative feelings like anger, sadness, hurt, loss, etc, end up producing more pain. Some people think that it's not possible to just switch these off, and certainly it can't be done by willpower or positive thinking. But it can be done with BMSA (which you can read about and try out at the end of this article).

Step 3: It's called social engagement. Yes, you definitely need to mix with people in a way that gives you pleasure. There's a whole field of science devoted to the health advantages (mental and physical) that comes from being involved with people socially, so when you have pain, you especially need to pay attention to this.

Step 4: Be more physically active. When people experience pain it's only natural that they want to stop moving and withdraw, and with acute pain that's actually sensible. But with chronic pain it's the last thing you should do because activity is essential to your recovery. In fact it's essential to even the most basic physical and mental health.

Step 5: Have an Interest or Hobby. When we've got nothing to think about except our pain, our pain gets worse. It's as if the nervous system picks up on all the attention it's getting and delivers more! The more you can get your focus absorbed in something else, the more you can help to trick your nervous system into shutting down the pain signalling.

Step 6: Are there any unhelpful family dynamics going on? Pain is a warning signal but the warning is not necessarily about anything going on in your body. It can be that your brain thinks you have a need to be dependent on others, or that your brain thinks you need protection from doing too much for others. And so it gives you pain. These co-dependency issues can generate all sorts of both physical and psychological symptoms, so it's certainly worth investigating them.

Step 7: Treat the pain itself - directly. It used to be that there was very little that could be done for true chronic pain - most treatments were ineffective or disappointing. But now we have BMSA (Brief, Multi-Sensory Activation) which clinical trials demonstrate to be successful in nearly 100% of people. Try out BMSA for yourself by following the instructions below!

AN EXPERIMENT WITH BMSA

Before you try any treatment, it's a good idea to "dip your toes in the water" and have some experience of what it's like. Not everyone responds straight away, but many people do, and so it's worth while going through the following steps to see what happens for you.

Get into a comfortable position, sitting or standing, and take a moment to think about how your pain actually feels to you. In your own words, make up a sentence that accurately describes precisely what you feel. Here's an example:

I have this burning pain in the middle of my lower back but a bit to the left I have this stabbing pain just above my tailbone I have this deep ache near my left hip Etc, etc, etc.

What we've done with these examples is to to describe how the pain actually feels (the type of pain) and where it feels like it's located, in our own words. Once you've done that for your own pain, decide how strong it is, using 10 as your benchmark. 10 out of 10 is the strongest pain you could imagine, and if you have 0, your pain would be completely gone.

Now you're going to say that statement over and over again, maybe 12 times, each time saying something silly on the end of it. And at the same time you're going to keep up a quick tapping process all over your head and body, using your fingertips to tap on your head, shoulders, face, chest, legs, anywhere you can reach. Mix it up, using tapping on the spot, tapping out shapes or letters of the alphabet.

In the example given above "I have this deep ache near my left hip", for instance, you could be tapping along saying:

"I have this deep ache near my left hip, but polka dots taste crunchy."

You repeat this whole sentence a dozen times while you keep up the tapping process. That's called a "bracket". At the end of the bracket, keep focussing on the pain, and as you do that tap repeatedly on your chest while you take a deep breath through your nose and then exhale forcefully from your mouth.

Once you've completed that first round, take a minute to check that pain. Has the level gone up or down? Is the pain in exactly same place or does it seem to have moved? Is the type of pain the same, or has it changed it some way? Are other body pains more noticeable now?

This is just a little taste of what BMSA can do, but of course it's not the whole picture. The book "The Pain Train - Time to Get Off" spells out much more detail and steps you through a personalised program designed to eliminate your pain permanently.