One of the areas in chronic pain that’s not as talked about is the role of identifying emotions and how the lack of knowing what you are feeling emotionally may emerge physically as somatic symptoms. Difficulty in identifying the emotions you are feeling is called alexithymia. Alexithymia has been implicated in multiple studies to have […]
This 2023 review study found an association between anxiety and autoimmune disorders. In fact what the meta-analysis found was that individuals experiencing anxiety were 1.28 times more likely to develop autoimmune diseases compared to those without anxiety. The researchers looked at data from 16 studies involving over 1.4 million participants. They state directly that the […]
Mind over matter? I found these two studies linked here very interesting as they show the power of the mind alone in affecting our health. I will talk about these in a moment. First I find it fascinating that many of us still think the mind is somehow separated from the body. I jokingly ask […]
When I think of the brain’s role in somatic symptoms, I think of three main outputs the brain can produce that will affect symptoms: 1) thoughts 2) emotions, and 3) behaviors. The brain is continually picking up input from our environment through our senses (taste, touch, smell, sight, sound, etc.) by perceiving what’s happening in […]
I want to review this new study that came out recently (May 2024) in the Clinical Journal of Pain. The results showed how we deal with emotions in real time can have an immediate effect on our pain experience. What the study found was that maladaptive emotion regulation (ER) strategies were associated with more pain […]
Let’s look at a new 2024 research paper that reviewed and looked at the neuroscience data on the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in chronic pain. The authors “suggest an updated model of what both the altered activity in and functional connectivity to the dorsal vmPFC may represent in people with chronic pain. […]
Here’a a 2017 study from New York University that found “that chronic pain rewires circuits in a brain region called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to increase “aversion,” the amount of attention paid to, and alarm felt about, any given pain signal. Most previous studies have focused on nociception, the intensity of incoming sensory signals […]
Anger is a primary emotion in all humans. How couples handle it during conflict can influence which health issues we are prone to getting, according to a 20 year study from UC Berkley and Northwestern University. What the researchers found was that those who had regular outbursts of anger were more prone to cardiovascular problems […]
One way to understand how the brain can create symptoms in the body is through fight, flight, freeze, fawn nervous system reactions. These stress or trauma reactions are real but they are protective in nature. They are meant to protect you from what the brain perceives as dangerous or threatening. Protection symptoms can be subtle […]
Wanted to touch on somatization again here as it’s something that is a focus point of the work I do with people with chronic somatic symptoms. According to this research paper, “more than one-third of the symptoms reported by outpatients remain medically unexplained after adequate evaluation and somatizing patients account for 10–20% of total medical […]
