Throughout history many healing traditions have focused on analgesia-the alleviation of pain-an area in which modern medicine provides few options beyond narcotics, steroids, and surgery. For those seeking drug- and surgery-free alternatives or complements to conventional pain management, the choices can be overwhelming. How do you know which method will work for you? In this guide to safe and effective natural therapies for acute and chronic pain, authors Marc S. Micozzi, M.D., Ph.D., and Sebhia Marie Dibra explain how your emotional boundary type-how you react to emotional, social, environmental, and physical stresses-affects which complementary treatments will work best for you. Providing an easy questionnaire to determine your emotional type and an interactive self-assessment for finding the right ,in treatment for your condition, they explore the effectiveness of mind-body treatments for each emotional type and for many common ,in disorders, including arthritis, back ,in, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel, ulcer, migraine headaches, carpal tunnel, anxiety, PTSD, and other chronic ,in conditions. They review the available research and scientific evidence in support of each therapy, suggesting only well-established, safe, and clinically proven alternative treatments, such as acupuncture, biofeedback, hypnosis, massage, chiropractic, yoga, herbs, and essential oils.
Approaching ,in holistically, they reveal how pain should be understood as o dynamic condition-an interaction between mind and body as well as between patient and therapy-and how your emotional type is key to long-lasting and successful results.
Taking a Natural Approach to Pain
While most of the mind-body pain disorders addressed in this book are poorly understood and poorly treated by Western medical care, they account for a huge amount of daily distress, discomfort, and disability. And these conditions are often chronic. Chronic diseases are those that are prolonged, do not resolve spontaneously, and are rarely cured completely. The rarity of complete cures in conventional medicine is related to the incompleteness of the old twentieth-century medical model of disease.
In 2003 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that chronic diseases affect almost 100 million Americans and account for one-third of the years of potential life lost before the age of sixty-five. The financial burden of treating chronic diseases now accounts for almost two-thirds of the total medical care costs in the United States.
Complementary and alternative (or integrative) medicine, or CAM, &fines a broad category of interventions, such as the mind-body modalities described in this book, that have not been taught widely at US. medical schools or generally available at U.S. hospitals. Nevertheless, is the twenty-first century, almost half of the adult population in the United States is already using CAM to help manage chronic diseases.
There has been growing awareness in recent years that one of the major motivations for learning, seeking, and applying what has been called "natural medicine," which we see as synonymous with CAM, is to address the prodigious problem of pain. In fact, the medical textbook Fundamentals of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (now in its sixth edition), written and edited by half of this author team, Marc Micozzi, has been the most requested book at the annual meetings of the American Association for Pain Management, although this basic text is a foundational survey of CAM approaches for health care professionals and is not especially focused on pain. This new book for health care consumers attempts to do just that; it has been written on the basis of information available from a multitude of medical and scientific literature, with the consumer foremost in mind. The dimensions and parameters of the pain problem have expanded dramatically over the past twenty years because of the aging population that is facing new challenges with respect to pain, including the looming use, misuse, and abuse of both legal pain medications and illegal drugs. The overwhelming implications for public health, law enforcement, and public policy have become evident across the county and worldwide. In my (Micozzi speaking here) former practice of forensic medicine, I encountered many cases of death from drug overdose (usually pain drugs). These overdoses were intentional (suicide), accidental, and occasionally homicidal. From an insurance standpoint, the main concern was determining not the manner of death, but whether the levels of drugs detected were consistent with the prescribed dosages.
Meanwhile, there have been large shifts in the accepted paradigm for health and healing when it comes to elucidating and understanding the bioenergetic model and the consciousness dimension of human health. In some places, medical practice is incorporating CAM under the rubric of so-called integrative medicine. In terms of this integration, the patient is confronted with a bewildering array of different CAM therapies from over twenty different major healing traditions, ranging from single, simple techniques to entire systems of medical practice and health care. Overcoming Acute and Chronic Pain: Keys to Treatment Based on Your Emotional Type is a guide for navigating the CAM waters, with specific guidance for you personally as an individual.
The Problem of Pain
We have over forty years of combined experience investigating and researching nondrug, natural treatments for pain, inflammation, and pain-related conditions, and new research confirming these approaches is growing exponentially. Every time we write something on the topic, more research comes in before the ink is dry. Complementary and mind-body therapies in general have many applications in addressing functional complaints, such as pain, and chronic pain disorders.
Pain and headache (head pain) are perhaps the two most common functional disorders of the human condition, experienced by virtually everyone on an acme basis at one time or another, and by millions on a chronic, episodic, or recurring basis. Throughout history, much of the effort in human healing traditions has been directed at analgesia-the alleviation of pain-through the discovery and development of materia medica (opiates, salicylates, etc.), physical manipulation (e.g., bone set-ting, chiropractic, traditional osteopathy, physical therapy), and massage, yoga, acupuncture, and mind-body approaches, all of which are addressed in this book. Energy healing represents a new frontier, yet it has ancient roots.
In the early history of American medicine, alleviating pain, together with preventing death, was one of the two central tenets of "rational medicine." Rational medicine in practice was a result of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, which was characterized by an outpouring of intellectual and scientific accomplishments as manifested in the field of economics by social philosopher Adam Smith, for example. In the mid-1700s it was brought to what was then known as the "American colonies" by doctors Morgan and Hutchinson of the University of Edinburgh, to the College of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania); there, the first school of medicine in what was to later become the United States was established in 1765 by charter from colonial governor John Penn. The rest is American medical history.
Today, pain is understood as a dynamic condition, not a static pathological state or defect. And while curing or removing a painful lesion may eliminate the pain (with the curious exception of conditions such as phantom-limb syndrome experienced by amputees), pain exists in many other contexts where there is no identifiable defect or abnormality to cure or remove.
Therefore, the assessment and management of pain, whether alter-native or mainstream, must lie in the interaction between the mind and the body, the healer and the patient, and the patient and the therapy.
Pain is a subjective complaint, and therefore its improvement is also subjective, yet associated with very high levels of patient satisfaction. Mind-body approaches are proving successful in the management of pain. The seventeenth-century Cartesian principle of the separation of mind and body has been an artificial accommodation to the philosophically limited understanding of health and healing that has prevailed for so long. This outdated concept of separation, which continues in Western medicine (but is not a factor in ancient Asian medical traditions, as we shall see later in this book), perhaps influences how we are conditioned to experience and express pain. In traditional societies in Africa and elsewhere, as an example, psychic gain is often "somatized" to a specific area of the body and presents as pain in a particular body part rather than as a general mental state.
The entire body acts beyond the brain-body barrier as an organ of consciousness through the movements of "molecules of emotion," a theory postulated by the late neuroscientist Candace Pert. In this scenario, mind-body distinctions begin to lose their meaning. A "gut feeling" is really being felt in the gut. And some of the diffuse pain associated with chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, for example, may ultimately be a conditioned response emanating from elsewhere.
The successful alleviation of pain and the treatment of other neurological conditions can no longer be considered alternative versus main-stream. What works should simply be considered good medicine.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
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Acupuncture & Acupressure (204)
Gem Therapy (23)
Homeopathy (505)
Massage (23)
Naturopathy (436)
Original Texts (223)
Reiki (60)
Therapy & Treatment (168)
Tibetan Healing (134)
Yoga (41)
हिन्दी (1128)
Ayurveda (3041)
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