SELF-MANAGING CHRONIC PAIN [ back to What's New ]
Although chronic pain management programs have sprung up in many communities, they are very expensive and very hard to get into. Program directors screen for adequate insurance coverage and for any psychological condition (e.g. addiction) or medical condition, which studies identify as a risk factor in not achieving successful completion of the program. Getting paid and getting insurance companies to select a particular program depends upon showing a consistently high rate of good patient outcomes, so program intake is slanted towards those patients most likely to show improvement, rather than the hard cases.

If a person with a brain or spinal cord injury who has CPD (chronic pain disorder) cannot get into a decent chronic pain management program because of lack of money, lack of insurance or rejection by the program director, is there a way to manage one's own pain? The answer is a qualified yes. While self-management cannot address all the problems associated with CPD, self-management is surely better than no management. Furthermore, since a portion of the suffering from CPD has to do with the psychological response of the individual to living with chronic pain, self-management makes sense, because one's attitude is at least partly under one's own control, and can be changed without the necessity for professional, outside intervention.

Dana S. DeBoskey, Phd has written an excellent book entitled "Pain: Making Life Livable," which is a blueprint for self-management of CPD, written in simple, non-technical terms and full of points to reflect on along with suggestions, exercises and goals for positive attitudinal change. The book is a slim and inexpensive, soft-cover volume available from HDI Publishers P.O. Box 131401 Houston, Texas 77219. This book and other self-help titles for persons living with a brain or spinal cord injury can be ordered from HDI by phone at (800) 321-7037 or by fax at (713) 956-2288. Recently there has been a lot of interest in the use of magnets to ease pain flareups as an alternative to narcotic analgesics like Vicodin, which make people drowsy and have a potential for addiction. One double-blind randomized study with real and placebo magnets has been done. The result was that pain patients who applied the real  magnets for 45 minutes obtained substantial pain relief as opposed to the placebo group which received very little or  none. The power of the magnets was the equivalent of two refrigerator magnets. No one has quite been able to explain the effectiveness of magnets in temporary relief of acute somatic pain. The theory of local increase in blood flow did not check out, because the magnets caused no increase in red skin color. The theory that the magnets affected the hemoglobin was rejected because the iron in hemoglobin does not react to magnets. One possibility is electro-magnetism, which might block pain signals by changing the flow of electric current in the nerve cells acting as pain fibers, but this is just speculation. Since there is no known harm in using magnets, why not try it?