Great to see these guys out of Stanford put out an article asking the scientific and medical community to bridge the gap between pain and emotion, as we have severed the mind from the body with pain for far too long. The authors put together a nice brain map you see here showing the overlap […]
Very interesting study that shows ‘Alexithymia’ was the only factor that predicted chronic pain 12 months after breast surgery. I call alexithymia the most important unknown word in chronic pain. It is significantly tied in with health issues in many studies. See my Youtube video here for more of the scientific research linking the two: […]
2020 study showing again how when we hold emotions in they can cause and exacerbate physical problems. In this case, anger repression and less anger expression was linked to asthma in adolescents. One of the keys is to learn emotional regulation strategies, how to identify, feel, and express all emotions so that they don’t create […]
Researchers at Penn State University have found that emotions themselves can act as stressors to create inflammation and pain in the body. In this study they found a link between emotions and rheumatoid arthritis (RA). “We often think of emotion as a consequence of stress or pain, but our findings suggest that under certain circumstances […]
One of the things to closely look at with chronic pain and chronic health issues are emotions. As I have talked about before, the definition of pain is an ‘unpleasant sensory and emotional experience’. The longer pain goes on without healing or when pain occurs with no physical trauma, we need to look less at […]
One of the most important things I look at with people in chronic pain is their emotion regulation style. Remember the definition if pain is a “sensory and emotional experience.” The more chronic the pain or pain that came on without a physical injury or around a time of elevated stress is likely to have […]
The power of fake knee injections is real and lasting in people with knee osteoarthritis(OA). See study link below. What is this? It’s called the placebo, but it’s really the power of your mind. It is your expectations and beliefs. You can harness new expectations and beliefs right now for healing without being tricked by […]
People have this belief that running is bad for their knees. And especially for knees with osteoarthritis. Well this systematic review of more than 1200 people over the age of 50 puts this belief to bed. Here is a snippet from the authors below: “Contrary to what we expected, we found little evidence to suggest […]
2020 study that looked at the association of MRI findings and long-term disability in chronic low back pain patients over a 13 year period. The goal was to assess whether long-term disability is associated with baseline degenerative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) findings in patients with low back pain (LBP). Guess what? It’s not. We know […]
One of the biggest issues with chronic pain and other chronic health ailments is that the sympathethic fight or flight nervous system is commonly in overdrive. We need to learn to activate the parasympathetic rest and digest branch of the nervous system for healing. I’m including a handout here that gives some perspective on how […]
