If this is you, then you are a member of a very large group of fellow sufferers, with 60% of patients visiting doctors doing so because of chronic pain, most of them unable to function fully at work, and most of them getting little or no relief, despite the time and cost of treatment.

Do you feel an affinity with others like you who have tried out various drugs or exercise programs, or even had surgery to cut nerve branches, and yet still struggle with pain?

And as in most cases where the "cure" fails, has your doctor or therapist started telling you that your pain is in your head? Even worse, have you actually tried a course of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy where they told you that indeed the pain is your fault, because you're causing the pain with your thoughts?

If you're not already angry, then you should be, because who would choose pain!? How could these medical professionals get it so wrong, wasting your time and your money on treatments that have proven to fail for the majority of people?

It's not really your doctors' fault, or the fault of your health professional or therapist, because in most cases these people, although highly knowledgeable and highly experienced, are quite unaware of the failure rates of the treatments they use. For example, CBT is often described as the "gold standard" for treatment of anxiety, depression, and chronic pain. And yet objective assessment of studies show that it has the same failure rate as placebo!

You may be getting angrier as you read this, and that's your right, but anger is only useful if it leads to action, and in this case is only useful if it leads you to do something about your chronic pain that gives you the reduction or elimination of the pain that you so wish for. So use your anger to galavanise you into learning a simple self-treatment process that has a very high rate of success, and tell everyone about it, including your doctors, so that we can get it to more of the people who need it the most.

A VERY DIFFERENT APPROACH TO CHRONIC PAIN

So your pain specialists don't know that their methods have a high failure rate. Something most of them do know but try to resist, is that you are not deliberately causing your chronic pain. That it might be in your brain, but that it's certainly not under your control! For your doctor to say that you should use willpower to change yourself or to control the pain is incredibly silly, and also brutally nasty.

Your pain specialist may have talked to you about lifestyle issues that affect your pain levels, but we're yet to find a specialist who understands how and why these mechanism affect your pain, or what to do about them.

The big reason why most pain specialists "bomb out" with their treatment is that chronic pain is almost never just about the muscles, or the nerves, or the joints, for example. And it's nothing like acute pain. Brain scans demonstrate that chronic pain behaves very much like emotional pain, and isn't necessarily related to injury.

So this explains why physical treatments are so ineffective, and why treatments using willpower (like CBT) are so cruel and worthless. Quite simply, these treatments don't even begin to touch the causes of chronic pain. Especially when many of those causes you aren't even consciously aware of! (I'll explain more about that soon.)

So now do you see why any chronic pain treatment, if it's to be successful, must actually work with you as a whole person, not just a body that has some physical pain?

The new theory of chronic pain gives us a much better understanding of what's going on, and at the same time makes the solution seem like common sense.

HOW CHRONIC PAIN OCCURS

Usually chronic pain doesn't just come "out of the blue". It arises after an initial injury of some kind or another. In those cases we first experience acute pain and that's a good thing because it warns us that something is wrong, helps us to take action to recover, and even helps to tell us what movements we shouldn't do so that the injured area can heal fastest. However in the case of chronic pain even though the injury heals, the pain persists and even becomes worse. And the signals we get to abstain from activity are not serving any useful purpose!

So chronic pain, unlike acute pain, doesn't have a direct correlation with the level of injury. Spine studies are notorious for helping us understand this important fact. For years now we've known that people with no spinal damage can have strong back pain, and people with massive spinal deterioration or damage can have no pain or disability at all! So no-one can guess just by looking!

Your chronic pain is created by your nervous system itself - not by any damage or injury that may be present. To help our patients understand how this could be, we offer the example of the electrical system that comprises a car alarm. If this system has a fault in it, it can cause the alarm to "go off" for no good reason at all, waking people up for absolutely nothing!

The difference is that your nervous system, although it certainly does have electrical components, is "smart" (meaning it can learn things) and more complex (so that more things are involved in it going wrong). Your nervous system can "go off" for just about any reason at all, and it will be different for everyone because it's YOUR nervous system.

We use the term "pain pattern" to describe what is actually happening when your nervous system creates chronic pain, and we do that because it's a reliable action. You feel a certain way, or a certain event occurs, and "bang", here comes that pain again, or here comes that flaring again. The right name though isn't "pain pattern" - it's "conditioned response"!

Most people with chronic pain have a complex range of conditioned responses that need to be identified and desensitised. This means really learning to notice your environment and body feelings, and you'll be surprised how easy and even fun that can be!

HOW CHRONIC PAIN CAN BE KNOCKED OUT FOREVER

Many years ago, we, like every other clinician, believed that it wasn't possible to do much, if anything, about these types of conditioned responses. We were taught that the best we could do was to help people to cope with them, and to get the most happiness they could out of life in spite of them. There are an awful lot of doctors and psychologists who still believe this. But conditioned responses are now probably the very easiest thing to deal with in the whole array of problems that affect people!

We're doing our best right now to explain to fellow clinicians that conditioned responses can be very easily eliminated if we run interference over them as they try to "run". If we do this properly, without needing the patient to use any willpower at all, the conditioned response quickly fades out, and can't return.

Now when we say we work with the conditioned response, this doesn't mean that we trigger the pain, because that's not necessary. What we're doing is running the thoughts and feelings that are linked with the pain, and interfering with those! It's very simple, and the patient can learn to do this for him/herself so that they have control of the process, which is called BMSA, or Brief, Multi-Sensory Activation Therapy.

THE BMSA CHRONIC PAIN PROGRAM - WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT

The BMSA Chronic Pain Program has a success rate which is very high, around 80-90% of people. You won't need to wait months to know whether it will work for you, because over 50% of people notice improvement immediately. Another 30-40% of people can take a few days to notice a result.

Overall, around 50% of people are able to totally eliminate their chronic pain. A further 25% of people reduce their pain by at least 50%, allowing them to cut back their medication and at the same time freeing them to be more active. A small number of people (perhaps 2%) get no result whatsoever and to date we've been able to explain that this is due to surgical considerations (eg hip replacement required).

You'll be pleased to note that we've never had to resort to blaming a client for failure!

Despite the speed at which the program works, it would be a mistake to regard it as an overnight miracle. Even if you get total elimination of pain immediately, you should nevertheless complete the program and continue tracking pain, flaring and medication rates. Most people find that they do still get some pain, with ups and downs, but that their chart shows a clear improving trend as they continue to make excellent progress.

The end result that you want is surely complete elimination of the pain, or a very big decrease in the pain, so that you can get your life back, and leave those days of suffering way behind!