Introduction

The overwhelming share of chronic pain is suffered by people with back pain, and yet treatment typically fails to eliminate or even reduce the level of suffering.

In Australia the treatment cost per annum of chronic, unrelieved physical pain is over $12 billion. In the USA it is more than double that. Lost productivity and other costs skyrocket these figures into the hundreds of billions. Not only is this a huge burden on the economy and the health system, but it represents an enormity of human suffering that is both appalling and terrifying.

Almost everyone has experienced extreme pain at one time or another. But most of us never have to endure the relentless, everyday agony that back pain patients suffer, with every movement, sometimes even breathing, bringing yet more pain.

Current methods have failed to help back pain patients in the majority of cases and I hope that the methods described here will replace those ineffective methods. Australian research demonstrates that it's now possible to bring immediate relief to the majority of people with back pain or neck main, with most of those achieving total elimination, regardless of how long they've suffered.

In the Australian research with long-term chronic pain patients with a history of at least 2 failed pain treatments, half the participants achieved a 100 per cent elimination of pain on the first treatment. Of the remainder, a majority enjoyed over 50 per cent reduction of their pain levels, and the results were permanent with one exception, a patient who, curiously, continued her high-velocity cervical spine manipulations even though her pain increased dramatically with each visit to her chiropractor.

The research is ongoing, with more information available on the web site.

We hope that this report will help you to:

** Really understand why your back pain treatments have been so disappointing, and how the myths of chronic pain have led to so many incorrect treatments even by the medical profession.

** Learn about a scientifically proven method for treating chronic back pain that has been used successfully in Australia for the past decade.

If you do decide you'd like to try the chronic pain program outlined here, it's crucial that you first have a diagnosis of chronic pain from your doctor, so that we can ensure there isn't any treatable underlying medical condition. With accurate diagnosis, we can then be more assured of getting the result you want.

So please never try to self diagnose any condition, especially pain, and never presume that if you've had the pain for many years, that the cause remains the same. Many people give up on their pain and stop seeing their doctor. We ask you to retain the supervision of your qualified medical specialist, and keep them informed of your progress through the program, should you decide to try it.

THE THEORY OF PAIN - HOW WE GOT IT WRONG

In times past we used to have beliefs and ideas about pain that in the light of current knowledge seem ignorant or even bizarre. Even now, with the benefit of a more evidence-based approach to the development and provision of interventions for pain, and even though we have made enormous progress in the treatment of acute pain (in most cases), conventional treatments for chronic physical pain still seem woefully inadequate in terms of satisfactory outcomes for patients.

It can be hard to understand this disparity in the research sector when we already have such good proof that chronic pain and acute pain are so different in their nature that they actually use 2 completely different nerve paths.

It is only very recently that this was clearly understood and better interventions have begun to be developed. (For a better understanding of the benefits and shortcomings of the variety of current chronic pain treatments, please download the more comprehensive report on the web site.)

The major factor in creating worthless chronic pain programs has been that program developers didn't understand that chronic pain is directly linked to the patient's internal state, which is affected by a whole range of completely non-physical issues.

Read on to see how chronic pain is produced by these non-physical factors, and what you can do about it even though willpower has nothing to do with it!

Through not understanding these factors, treatment was directed at the patient's physical activity only, and the patient was (and often still is) told to "push through the pain" to complete excruciating exercise regimes, often causing the patient enormous physical and emotional distress.

Another areas where therapists have been incorrect is in the blaming of the patient for "bringing on the pain", supposedly because the patient wasn't "disciplined" enough in their thinking. Several current approaches still try to get the patient to change their internal voice using nothing but willpower!

Yes, thoughts and attitudes (and beliefs) do help create pain. However thoughts, attitudes and beliefs are not under the patient's control, and any therapist who tries to force the patient to change these using sheer willpower or self discipline is inflicting an ignorant and cruel treatment.

We now have an intelligent, proven, and human alternative to those outdated methods, where we permanently "decondition" the emotional states attached to the thoughts, attitudes and beliefs that have become linked to the pain. When pain can be relieved so simply and easily, why would anyone want to do it the hard way?

We've been fortunate that technology has improved to the point where we've been able to clear up the misunderstanding between acute and chronic pain. Brain imaging shows conclusively that chronic pain and acute pain are entirely different, with maps of chronic pain looking just like maps for sadness, or anger, for example.

To us it's rather incredible that no-one else seems to have identified the relationship to learning theory and memory studies. If only they had, we would get other researchers joining us instead of wasting time on red herrings! If only they would realise that the same brain processes that give rise to conditioned responses and memory also give rise to chronic pain.

But so far in the story of development of pain programs, misunderstanding and lack of informatioin has led to a mass of programs which have as their goal teaching the patient to "cope" with their pain, rather than actually relieving it.

And now it should be clear to you why analgesics, surgery, CBT, acupuncture, osteopathy, hypnotherapy, and chiropractic have all failed to deliver relief that is of any permanence or significant to people with unrelenting back pain.

A SENSIBLE, PROVEN APPROACH TO BACK PAIN

Now that we no longer misunderstand the nature of chronic back pain we can stop blaming the patient, and stop treating back pain as if it were an entirely physical problem. We can instead eliminate the actual cause of your unrelenting back pain, which is the conditioned activity of your central nervous system.

Very differently to any other chronic pain program, this program is intended to eliminate your back pain. That is the aim. And it successfully eliminates pain by disrupting the mechanisms which activate your pain signalling, permanently.

The method of treatment is BMSA, or Brief, Multi-Sensory Activation and most people can learn to self-treat very quickly and easily, gaining immediate results even when they've tried many other pain programs and failed.

Australian clinical research over the past 6 years shows that we can expect around 95% of true chronic back pain patients to achieve either total elimination of their back pain, or dramatically reduce their back pain.

Further reports and case studies are freely available on the web site.