Online therapy for your body

What is Chronic Pain?

Pain is an important part of the body's protective system. It's normal. It protects and alerts you to danger, usually before you have injured yourself or once you have an injury. Pain makes you move and behave differently and that's important because you need to rest an area to help healing. Your body protects the part that is injured while it heals.

Acute pain lasts a short time and has a definite cause. Pain that lasts for three months or more is chronic pain and often there doesn't seem to be an identifiable source. You may have had an injury some time ago but the pain persists, even though your body has healed. The pain you're still feeling is not helpful any more.

The science part of pain is really interesting (to me, anyway). Your nerves can become overly sensitive so that sometimes even light sensation ends up being interpreted as pain. Small movements that used to cause pain while you had the injury, may still cause pain. The interpretation of pain by the brain is a complex series of events. A nerve picks up a signal, sends it to the spinal cord, which decides if it's important enough to send up to the brain and then your brain assesses the messages from the nerves and interprets them by comparing previous memories of similar situations. When nerves are too sensitive, they're sending incorrect messages to the brain and your brain may tell you to experience pain when you no longer need to.

Here's the good news: your brain can be retrained and nerves that were hypersensitive can change too. Your body can also become stronger to give you extra support. By doing the right exercises to help your body, with the knowledge and understanding of how your body responds to faulty pain signals and learning how to pace yourself so you work out how much you can do, without overdoing it, you can learn to cope better, to move better and you learn how to not expect pain from movements that were previously causing faulty pain signals.

The support that I offer to help you go from experiencing chronic pain to becoming stronger and more able to cope, includes video consultations, email support and phone calls, as you need them. Your video appointment will help me to assess and ask questions so I can get a clear idea of the difficulties you are having with pain and movement. After your video appointment, I will email you a treatment plan that includes exercises and information about the science behind how pain works and how to work out your average activity level. You will also get some relaxing techniques to use to help you cope with anxiety because change is hard work. You'll be asking your body and brain to change the way they react. It's quite normal to feel anxious when you're making changes, so learning new ways to relax and feel calm or using techniques that you already know, can really help.

You'll be encouraged to slowly become more active. Understanding that pain isn't always a signal to stop, should help improve your confidence to move and to use the area that causes pain. The treatment plan allows you to progress with the exercises and increase your level of activity. The level you are at is always under your control.

How much support you will need will depend on each individual. It may take about six to seven weeks before you feel you are making progress. I would suggest an initial week of a video appointment plus seven days of email support and then one week where you try to follow the treatment plan on your own (although if you want an additional week of email/video support, you can have this). You may find it helpful, once you've had your first week of support, to have a further week of support every two weeks. In total, it may take about six or seven weeks to get used to the changes and to feel like you have made real progress towards changing how your body responds.

I had a period of chronic pain, which was a combination of muscle weakness and an injury. By slowly increasing the amount of exercises I did and challenging my thinking on pain, I was able to eventually decrease the pain until now I very seldom have any and when I do, I know exactly what to do to alleviate it. It took time and I had to learn to be patient and kind to myself.

What I noticed more of in the health service, among doctors and physios, was a tendency to expect physical pain that couldn't be linked to a current injury, to be stress related. When I asked for help from doctors, I kept being asked if I was anxious or if I had recently had a stressful event. While stress may sometimes influence how our brain interprets certain physical movements, it's more than just being stressed or anxious and needing to meditate, do yoga or be mindful (some of the solutions suggested to me by doctors). I am confident the support that I offer can help because it's based on research and evidence. Learning how your body responds to pain, together with a practical approach to slowly building up your strength and movement, as well as learning to relax (because being in pain and making changes are both stressful), is a good way to relieve at least some of the pain you are currently experiencing. Change takes time, so it may take you longer than six or seven weeks, but you will be doing as much of it on your own or with my support, as you feel necessary.

---

---