The Neuroscience of Chronic Pain Relief

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The Best Alternative Chronic Pain Relief Solutions

author: Davoud Derogar

Table of Contents

Table of Contents 3 Dedication 5 Copyrights 7 Gratitude 8 Introduction 10 DISCLAIMER 12 Costs of Chronic pain and statistics 13 What is acute and chronic pain? 18 Types of pain 22 What is Pain Cycle? 26 Common Alternative Treatments for Chronic Pain: 27 Hypnosis 29 What if some chronic pain is a sign of stress? 32 The gate control theory of pain 37 How pain mechanism works 38 The Peripheral Nervous System 40 Dr. Apkar Apkarian neuroscientist 42 Who is Dr. Apkar Vania Apkarian? 44 Dr. Norman Doidge 47 Dr. Michael H Moskowitz 48 Dr. Moscowitz's story: 50 Dr. Lorimer Moseley neuroscientist 57 Who is Dr. Lorimer Moseley? 57 Dr. Lorimer Moseley's personal story 57 Dr. John Sarno surgeon 62 Psychology of psychosomatic disorder 62 TMS Theory: 64 Who was Dr. John Sarno: 66 Pete Egoscue Pain Relief Expert 69 Norman Cousins, UCLA professor 78 Helpful value, what stress does to the body! 81 Final notes about stress 89 Helpful ideas 93 About the Author 96 Knowledge quotes 98 Pain quotes 99 Final note 101 Dedication

To anyone who has chronic pain. If the pain is robbing you of your quality-of-life. If pain is stopping you from enjoying time with your family and friends. If pain is stopping you from your hobbies and interests. If the pain is stopping you from being active and in control. I hope this book will give you a better understanding of chronic pain so that you can eliminate your pain, reduce or manage your pain better and have a joyful life. Please be open minded. I am sure this book will help you to ease your pain and possibly get rid of pain that is holding you back in life.

This book is dedicated to you. I thank you for taking the time, for not giving up hope to get rid of your pain. So that you can go back to your normal life and maybe back to work, back to your old hobbies, back to your family. So that you can sleep well without waking up in the middle of the night with pain. Your dedication is appreciated.

“Before you heal someone, ask him if he is willing to give up the things that made him sick.” - Hippocrates 460 BC - 377 BC - Greek Physician, father of medicine

Why do you still have chronic pain? Would you like to get rid of your pain? Have you checked all the other possibilities? This book will help you to understand chronic pain so that you can manage or eliminate your pain. What do you want? What can help you to better manage your pain or relief your pain? Does your belief and mindset help you to get better? Neuroscience of Chronic Pain Relief What conventional doctors do not tell you or do not know to tell you about your chronic pain. This is a collection of options or solutions to your chronic pain that you have been waiting for.

“What you are looking for is looking for you.” - Poet Rumi 800 years ago Copyrights

“Copyright © 2019, All rights reserved.” In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and elec- tronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the author constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s in- tellectual property. No portion of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the author, Davoud Derogar. “Neuroscience of Chronic Pain Relief.” E- Books. https://www.nlpsuccesscoaches.com, Success Coach, LLC and Showleh Tolbert. Gratitude

Thank you for taking your precious time and reading my book. I ap- preciate you for sharing this information with your friends, family members and others. I thank you in advance for sending me an email ([email protected]) and correcting any mistakes so that I can improve this book and myself and grow. I thank all the friends and family members for their support. I specially thank, my mentor, psychologist Dr. Aliakbar Ziglari to help me to come to this wonderful country and further my education and better my life.

Finally, I thank my wife Showleh for believing in me and supporting me. I thank my dog princess Nala for staying up with me and keeping me company when I was researching and writing. I thank friends and family members for the support and encouragements.

I thank google search engine, Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube for providing me information for my research that could help the readers to get well and be pain free.

Introduction

Knowledge is power.

Information can change our life and sometimes we do not have all the information to help us do what we want.

This book is written with the intention of helping you to reduce or eliminate your physical or emotional pain. If surgery, medication and all the other interventions did not help, you might consider a new approach and then maybe you will be able to manage or get rid of your pain (please consult with your doctor). This book is all about interventions that have been around for at least 30 years, but you might not know about them. You can learn something new that you didn’t know before, or learn something about yourself, your behavior, habits and beliefs that you were not aware of or you have overlooked (many thing in life are done automatically). When you bring to awareness what you need to know, it could help you in pain reduction or pain relief.

I hope when you know them clearly, they can help you eliminate or at least reduce your pain. This information could help you. Information that can lead to a drastic change in your life. Unfortunately, information alone can not change life automatically, it can only work if you participate and take action and put them to use for your advantage. I thank you for your time, being open-minded and reading this book. May you get great results from reading it. “The Neuroscience of Chronic Pain Relief” is about giving you a positive result. Do with it what you will, it is all about you and your pain.

I can only celebrate your success. I can only affect the people who want to change and I hope you are one of them. My hope is that this book can help you feel better. Please do consult with your medical doctor and tell your physician about my book. Please, email (davoudderog- [email protected]) and share your success so that we can celebrate our success. I hope you let your physical and negative mental and emotional pains to dissolve. Our website is www.nlpsuccesscoaches.com DISCLAIMER

This is a collection of information from neuroscientists, psychologists and positive thinkers. It is intended to inform you what experts think of chronic pain. The medical terminology is hard to understand for some people that is why I have written this book with very simple words to be easy to understand for everyone.

This Book is not to be taken as professional advice or as a substitute for professional advice. Please always consult with your physician and pain specialists. I suggest you ask them to read this book for additional information. I hope you will be able to do your part to reduce or eliminate your pain.

My aim is for you to learn and understand what experts say about chronic pain. Chronic pain may result from an underlying disease or health condition, an injury, medical treatment (such as surgery), in- flammation, or a problem in the nervous system (in which case it is called neuropathic pain), and in some cases it may be caused by emotional reasons or the cause may be unknown. Costs of Chronic pain and statistics

Pain can affect quality of life, productivity, efficiency, mood, personality and it may be accompanied by difficulty in moving around, dis- turbed sleep, anxiety, depression, and other problems.

More than 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain at a cost of around $600 billion a year in medical treatments and lost productivity. Study shows that 24% of the chronic pain are back pain.14% shoulder, 14% neck pain and 4% face pain. Worldwide about 1/4 of people have chronic pain.

National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) shows that 11.2 percent of American adults (25.3 million people) have experienced some form of pain every day for the past three months. The study also found that — 17.6 percent of American adults — suffer from "severe pain.”

According to the NIH analysis, 17.7 percent of chronic pain patients seeking out complementary treatments used natural products, 10.9 percent turned to deep breathing, and 10.1 percent practiced yoga, tai chi, or qi gong. Only 38.7 percent of people with chronic pain look for alternative ways to get rid of their pain.

There are two types of people with chronic pain. Some people become passive and give up hope and just try their best with pain killers. There are a few that are very active and look for solutions to get rid of their pain or to reduce their pain. My guess is you are the active person since you are reading this book, you are searching for a cure or solutions.

Majority of the people with chronic pain don’t think or seek for a ‘cure’, but they just want to treat and manage the pain in order to make their day-to-day lives as normal as possible. Many people with chronic pain say that the treatments for chronic pain are not effective and many give up hope of going back to their normal life. Too many people get stuck and that’s when they run into problems. You should ask yourself a few questions that could help you find better solutions. What is holding me back or what is my biggest block to getting better or seeking the help that I need? Have I given up hope? Have I exhausted all possibilities for treatment? Do I have a lot of stress? Am I depressed? Am I angry about losing my abilities? Do I have a supportive network of family or friends? Do I blame others for my pain?

When you look at your pain with hope for cure, you could find better solutions and if you give up hope you have closed the door for possibilities of getting better. There is always hope. Just keep on reading and you will see.

The Dalai Lama said, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” You will find out that your thoughts and emotions can affect your pain and that is what this book is about. What I propose is that when you decide to see things from a positive view, your pain will reduce and in some cases it could be eliminated. So what would motivate you to feel better and then get better?

Technology Review magazine Reports: For patients not covered by health insurance, a laminectomy, typically used to treat spinal stenosis[1] , a narrowing of the spine that occurs mostly in people over 50, typically costs $50,000 to $90,000. For patients not covered by health insurance, spinal fusion, typically used to treat conditions such as a slipped vertebra, fractured vertebra or other spinal instability, typically costs $80,000 to$150,000 or more; a surgery in which high-end titanium implants are used instead typically will fall on the higher end.

A recent report by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a federal organization, found that in 2007, 27 million adults reported back problems with $30.3 billion spent on treatments to ease the pain. While some of that money is spent on physical therapy, pain management, chiropractor visits, and other non-invasive therapies, a big chunk pays for spine surgeries.

Incidence of Pain, as Compared to Major Conditions Pain affects more Americans than diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined. The chart below depicts the number of chronic pain sufferers compared to other major health conditions. The American Acad- emy of pain medicine report.

Condition Number of Suﬀerers Source

Chronic Pain 100 million Americans Institute of Medicine of The Na- tional Academies (2)

Diabetes 25.8 million Americans American Diabetes Association (diagnosed and estimated undi- (3) agnosed)

Coronary Heart Dis- 16.3 million Americans American Heart Association (4) ease (heart attack and chest 7.0 million Americans pain) Stroke

Cancer 11.9 million Americans American Cancer Society (5) Danger Ahead: The Diagnosis Back surgeries can fail for a devastating- ly simple reason: The operation was not the right treatment, because the surgeon never pinpointed the source of the pain. As a result, patients may be just as miserable as they were before — or worse off — and a desperate number choose to try again. By two years after their first surgery, about 8 percent of patients have had another operation; by 10 years after, the rate jumps to 20 percent, an analysis of Washing- ton State hospital data found. That's why it's critical to have a thor- ough workup — to get a sense of the root cause of your pain, says Arnold J. Weil, M.D., director of the Non-Surgical Orthopedic & Spine Center in Atlanta. X-rays and MRI scans can be helpful, too — but only if your doctor has good reason to suspect a particular problem. Go on a fishing expedition, and you could end up with the wrong diagnosis — and ineffective treatment. That's because high-tech images routinely uncover bulging discs and other scary-looking "abnormalities". Trouble is, those often have nothing to do with what's hurting. "If you took 100 people off the street and gave them MRIs, a third of them — even if they had no back pain whatsoever — would have obvious structural problems," says Dr. Rosen. At best, your doctor might be misled by your abnormal X-ray or MRI, or hope that the abnormality is the cause of your pain and that by fixing it, he'll make you better. At worst, says Dr. Rosen, "the doctor knows full well that the image could be a red herring, but the chance to 'fix' something, and get paid for it, is just too good to pass up.”

In the U.S., more than 1,150,000 people go under the knife for spinal problems every year, a rate double that of most developed countries and five times that of the United Kingdom, says Dr. Deyo. Yet the out- comes have been no better. "Maybe 5 percent of patients with back pain need surgery," says Dr. Rosen.

Please do get second or maybe third opinion before deciding. ✽✽✽

What did you learn? Was this useful? Please write them down and think about it for a few minutes while breathing deeply and very slowly as possible for you. What is acute and chronic pain?

Acute pain: a feeling of mild to severe discomfort and pain caused by injury, trauma or never damage. Its purpose is to warn that tissues are damaged so that the injured person could withdraw from the source of injury or stop activities that could cause more damage.

Chronic pain: Aching sensation that persists for more than a few months (more than expected healing time). It may or may not be associated with trauma or disease, and may persist after the initial injury has healed.

Causes of pain One could have: Physical illness Bacteria Tumor That may seem it is out of our control or genetic. A mental problem caused by others or environment.

I like to add a not so obvious one that can cause all the problems above. This is my own personal opinion, but see if it makes sense to you. Sometimes we have an internal conflict with others because we may not able to see or understand, because we are used to it or maybe others tell us and we do not accept their right views to correct and reduce our internal conflicts. Know that internet conflict can add to our pain. Certainly, this one we can control or change and I have seen many with poor, negative personality(excuse makers, complainers). They think everyone is at fault but me, or everyone hates me. I do not say they get sick only by being negative oh no, but really seeing them or hearing from them makes me uncomfortable or sick for a while. How hard is it to live with yourself if you have a negative personality? What I am proposing is when they get sick, they have more pain and stay sick for a longer time. If one’s personality is so bad, guess what, they may not have a great support from family and friends and that can easily cause more pain or possibly for a longer time. My main point is, if your happiness level is low, It will take you a longer time to heal. I hope you consider to see what happens when you are stressed and what can happen when you are less stressed and relaxed. Norman Cousins my hero he healed himself with laughter. Have you tried Laughter yoga? Just laugh for no reason (you are permitted, or give yourself permission to laugh). Who laughs with no reason?

“Be happy for no reason, like a child. If you are happy for a reason, you’re in trouble, because that reason can be taken from you.” ― Deepak Chopra

Please just laugh for any reason or no reason at all when you are in pain pretend for about 5 minutes and you will see your pain gets less and less. Just laugh for no reason and check your pain level, it worked, right? If it did not, laugh some more. HHHHHahahahhahaah. I am helping you. Do a santa hahaha or hohohoh.

The stressful events that happen in our social circles can change our life and our pain. What happens in your social life affects your personal life, sometime not immediately. Sometime troubles are suppressed and add up and the body gets overloaded without knowing and pain comes back (Notice I said sometimes).

We do our best to deal or attempt to cope with what is or was going on in our life, but we do not realize what it can do to our body or mind until after it is too late to prevent it going too far and damaging our body more. Sometime the real reason we get sick or have pain could be from too much stress. I am a good driver with no tickets for a long time and I am grateful to have had no accidents, but ask me, how do you drive when you are stressed or have something in mind that stresses you? How many time was I close to hit or be hit by another driver when I was stressed or someone was stressed or anxious? How many times due to stress or how long do we zoom out while driving and come back without releasing we have been driving? Does that ring a bell?

I do not have statistics, but I think many accidents that can be avoided are caused by stress or anxiety. No one with a healthy mind will get out of his or her house thinking let's have an accident today. We all want to go back to our family at the end of day, but if we have anxiety, stress, less attention and focus, would you think we are in danger or put others in danger? I know this book is about chronic pain, but my point is stress, anxiety in life can cause accident and accidents can cause pain to the body to self and others so watch out and let the stress go before you start the day, otherwise this bad personality directly or indirectly could cause more hurt to ourselves or others. We know our body health affects our mind and our mind health affects our body health.

The sooner we look at not one but all areas of life such as physical, emotional, mental, and social side of life, the better we can find solutions and that includes our pain.

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What did you learn? Was this useful? Could this help you with the pain? Please write them down and think about it for a few minutes while breathing deeply and very slowly as possible for you.

Types of pain

When we understand the different types of pain, this could help us identify and explain it better so our doctors could help us better.

The most concern with pain is to recognize the difference between acute and chronic pain. There are a few differences, but the main difference is about the duration of pain.

Acute pain has a limited duration for healing and after healing the pain goes away. It's caused by damage to tissue such as bone, muscle, or organs, and that often causes anxiety or emotional stress.

Chronic pain lasts longer than acute pain (depending on the expected time to heal, if pain persist after the expected time of healing usually more than 6 weeks or in some cases it could last for a lifetime). Also, In some cases, such as with fibromyalgia Chronic pain can be the result of damaged tissue, but very often is due to nerve damage.

Chronic pain is ongoing and in some cases seems almost constant and could have psychological consequences such as depression and anxiety. At the same time, psychological distress can amplify the pain.

Phantom Pain: a pain caused by lost limb due to war, accident or diabetes. Even though the limb is no longer part of the body, the pain is felt by the patient in the area of the limb that has been detached from the body.

Referred pain: Sometime, stomach pain can cause neck pain, gallblad- der could cause right side body pain, stroke causes left-hand side pain. Referred pain is a pain in another part of the body rather than where the body is hurting. Systemic pain: when more than one part of the boy is in pain or all over pain like fibromyalgia.

Injury: Due to accident or illness, cut or burn.

There are two different categories of pain: Nociceptive pain and Neuropathic pain. Nociceptive pain can be divided into somatic (relating to external body parts) and visceral (the internal organs in the main cavities of the body, especially those in the abdomen, e.g. the intestines).

Neuropathic pain relates to the peripheral and central nervous system.

T h e c e n t r a l nervous system ( C N S ) i s t h e p a r t o f the nervous system consisting of the brain and spinal cord. The pe- r i p h e r a l nervous system ( P N S ) i s t h e d i v i s i o n o f the nervous system containing all the nerves that lie outside of the central nervous system (CNS). The primary role of the PNS is to connect the CNS to the organs, limbs, and skin.

Somatic pain (Nociceptive pain) involves the skin the bone the joint and soft tissues it is a musculoskeletal type injury from the accident or a sports injury, burn and cuts.

Somatic pain is localized. The patient can usually point to the location or site of pain. For example, the patient would say I have elbow pain and show exactly where it hurts. The patient usually describes it as sharp aching or throbbing pain. It is usually a constant pain. It could increase with any movement and patient at rest has less pain.

Visceral pain (Nociceptive pain) is from internal damage of the organs and body parts to soft tissue or injury around different organs like the heart, the lung the stomach and so on. This is not external pain so it is poorly localized and difficult to describe and sometimes it is described as deep aching pain or cramping pain. It comes in waves.

Neuropathic pain: Damage to the nervous system whether it be peripheral nerves or central nervous system. The pain from the spinal cord is the example of neurotic pain. It is usually described as burning stabbing, shooting pain. This type of pain may be a stimulus by a light touch so if some- body has neuropathic pain in their arms and you lightly touch them, it might feel like you're really punching their arm or hurting them because that area has become sensitive.

Somatic pain should get less and less, by time after expected time for healing from the injury or illness. With neurotic pain, the pain could persist for a longer period after healing or in some cases the injury may not be detected and the pain persists for a long time and becomes chronic pain.

Psychogenic Pain: Psychogenic pain is the term for pain caused by a psychological reasons, such as anxiety and depression that causes physical illness, such as headache, fatigue and muscle aches and pains. It is hard to treat psychogenic pain with drugs effectively and alternative treatment of relaxation and counseling is helpful.

Idiopathic Pain: Idiopathic pain is pain that exists when there is no known physical or psychological cause. Idiopathic pain is often difficult to treat. Fi- bromyalgia and TMJ are examples of idiopathic pain.

TMJ: Temporomandibular disorders (TMD) occur as a result of problems with the jaw, jaw joint and surrounding facial muscles that control chewing and moving the jaw. Idiopathic pain is often difficult to treat.

Breakthrough pain refers to flares of pain that occur even when pain medication is being used regularly and medication does not affect the intensity of pain. Sometimes it can be spontaneous or set off by a seem- ingly insignificant event such as rolling over in bed. And sometimes it may be the result of pain medication wearing off before it's time for the next dose. Many patients with chronic pain return to their doctor and ask for stronger or different pain medication when the prescribed medicine effect wears out and eventually, the patients think no medicine is working for them.

Other Ways Pain Is Classified A third category is psychogenic pain. Psychogenic pain is a pain that is affected by psychological factors. Psychogenic pain most often has a physical origin either in tissue damage or nerve damage, but the pain caused by that damage is increased or prolonged by such factors as fear, depression, stress, or anxiety. In some cases, pain originates from a psychological condition.

Pain is also classified by the type of specific tissue that's involved or by the part of the body that's affected. For example, pain may be referred to as muscular pain or joint pain, chest pain . The pain you experience may be an ache, a sharp stabbing, or a throbbing. It could come and go, or it could be constant. You may feel the pain increase when you move or cough or sneeze. Sometimes, breathing deeply can intensify it.

Pain caused by nerve damage happens when nerves are transmitting pain signals to and from the brain. Damage to nerves can interfere with the way those signals are transmitted and cause pain signals that are abnormal. For instance, you may feel a burning sensation even though no heat is being applied to the area that burns. Pain sensation The experience of pain could vary from one person to the next and that depends on many factors like, pain tolerance, pain threshold, past pain experiences, strength. For example an athletic person who runs marathons, can stand pain better than a non-athletic person, because of an exposure to pain more than an average person could have. So pain perception could be different from a person who does not exercise. Pain is a very unpleasant sensory and emotional experience. It has multiple causes, and people respond to it in their own different indi- vidual ways. Pain is one of the body's most important communication tools. Pain is one way the body tells you something's wrong and needs attention. For example, if accidentally you put your hand on a hot stove and you could not feel the pain. Obviously, the damage would be worse. Sensitivity to pain and emotions, moods, and personality could affect the intensity, duration and location of pain experience. Different people can have different experience of pain with different intensity and durations.

What is Pain Cycle? Chronic pain can interfere with activities of daily living in the home, workplace, and community.

When treatment of pain is ineffective that leads to stress, anger, frustration, and isolation. When pain persists, a person may avoid activities for fear of further pain or injury, which could lead to decreased activity levels and physical weakness. As the pain persists, negative beliefs and negative emotions increase about the pain and negative self-talk and thoughts come to mind.

For some people, chronic pain leads to the loss of social and occupa- tional responsibilities and status. Combined with social withdrawal, these changes in one's life can cause emotional trauma. These negative beliefs and thoughts, along with decreased participation in enjoyable activities, contribute to feelings of depression and anxiety. All of these could contribute to the pain cycle.

A cycle that is not obvious for all and then the pain could persist for a long time with higher intensity and result in a feeling that there is no hope for solutions. Fear, anger, stress, anxiety can cause tension in the muscles in your body which can intensify the pain.

All negative emotions can disrupt your sleep and lack of sleep could even cause more pain and more fatigue. The cycle would continue and the cure or management of pain could be delayed. Fear of pain can cause anxiety, tension, stress all leading to a possible depression that could cause more physical pain to accelerate in addition to original pain from the injury to the body and the cycle of fear could contribute to the cycle of pain coming back with revenge and staying for a long time adding to suffering.

Common Alternative Treatments for Chronic Pain: Acupuncture, Herbal Remedies, Massage, and Mind-Body Techniques

Some people with chronic pain find relief with complementary and alternative medicine. When prescription medication is not effective at treating chronic pain, they find relief with complementary and alternative medicine.

Hypnosis, meditation, yoga, massage therapy, and natural supplements, are common. Integrative treatments can be used with tradition- al medicine or as an alternative to conventional methods. You may need to try several alternative treatments to find the right one that works for you.

Hypnosis, Acupuncture, Biofeedback, Herbal supplements, Massage, Yoga, meditation and deep breathing, Aroma therapy, Energy therapies, Spirituality Healing, Touch healing, imagery, are examples of the most common alternative medicine. It is out of scope of this book to talk about all the alternative methods. You could research any on these methods, but since I use hypnotherapy to help my clients release their pain, I decided to mention it here. I hope it can help you relief or reduce your pain. Hypnosis

Hypnosis is a procedure that involves positive, pleasant imaginations in which you are guided by a hypnotherapist to release your pain. It is to create a relaxation for changes in perceptions, sensations, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Hypnosis is learning how to use your mind to your benefit by relaxing and when we relax it can have awesome results. You could learn how to let negative emotions go and replace it with positive learning. The new thoughts and feelings will build a new neurology in your mind for better outlook and behaviors. You could learn how to manage your emotions, anxiety, stress and that could help you release unpleasant physical pain or certain habits or behaviors (like smoking, nail biting). You could also learn how to do self-hypnosis and guide yourself through a hypnotic procedure. Self-hypnosis is like meditation except you do not try to empty your mind from thoughts instead to install, bring or think about positive thoughts that will bring happiness and that could influence you to let go on suppressed past negativity as a result that could help you reduce pain or eliminate it. It really works and I have helped many people to relieve their pain. My clients were able to go back to their life with freedom from pain. To be fair, I have to mention that I have used four different modalities to help my clients. I have used NLP, Time line therapy, Hypnotherapy and coaching to help my clients with pain and that was determined when I gave them initial complimentary session to know with detailed history of their pain what could help them. Myths About Hypnosis

There are some misconceptions about Hypnosis. That is due to too many movies that portray hypnotherapy is for controlling others. It is not about controlling anyone, but to help them to control their own life to fit what is best for them. I often have my clients say no-one can hypnotize them and I agree and I tell them, I show you how to hypnotize yourself as any hypnotherapy is only self-induced for the wellbeing of the client.

How can hypnosis help my clients cope with chronic pain?

As an alternative therapy compared to other non-medical interventions, Hypnosis has been found to be generally more effective than physical therapy and pain education. Hypnosis has greater influence on the sensation of pain. Hypnotist may be able to reduce stress, relieve anxiety, improve sleep, improve mood, and reduce the need for opioids. Further, hypnosis can enhance the efficacy of other well-established treatments for pain. Hypnosis is used for surgery and there are hypo-dentists who help patients have their procedures without anes- thesia for pain. The great thing is that it is non-invasive(no touching, no puncturing and no phobia of needles). You might consider giving it a try and learn how to hypnotize yourself for your advantage.

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What did you learn? Was this useful? Could this help you with your pain? Please write them down and think about it for a few minutes while breathing deeply and very slowly as possible for you.

What if some chronic pain is a sign of stress?

What Role Emotions Play in Chronic Pain

"WHY do I hurt?"

All physical injuries will cause physical and mental hurt. Your pain is real due to physical illness, but the better question is what causes the physical damage. Simply and clearly said, there are a lot of causes. Physical damage, tumor, bacteria and mental traumas or anything that causes unbearable stress problems (all illnesses are a form of stress on our body).

If someone has an accident and a bone in the body breaks (it is obvious with clear location), he will get help from his doctor to fix this problem. Most illnesses have certain healing time. Sometimes we get sick by bacteria, toxins and we may not know it for a few days even months unless we get signs of being sick and we have symptoms like vomiting, fever, digestion problems or skin rash to name a few. Then, we go to a doctor and get hopefully healed.

We have good and bad bacteria in the body. Enough to fill a big soup can. "That's three to five pounds of bacteria," says Lita Proctor, the program coordinator of the National Institutes of Health's Human Micro- biome Project, which studies the communities of bacteria living on and in us. The bacteria cells in our body outnumber human cells 10 to 1, she says, but because they are much smaller than human cells, they ac- count for only about 1 to 2 percent of our body mass—though they do make up about half of our body's waste. These bacterias are in balance and we do not get sick by them unless we get stress, do not sleep right, eat well, work too hard or too much and then immune system gets weak and then the bacteria take over. Does this make sense (this is a simple view, but it is true). When my wife gets sick and has a cold, I never get sick from her, because I know if I am stressed all kind of bacteria in my body can take over and hurt me, but just knowing that and dealing with my own stresses positively, I do not get sick. This had been tested by many researchers. They send different volunteers to a room to spend time with a person with a cold and cough. The volunteers with most stress mostly get sick and volunteers with less stress do not get sick. I know a cold is or can be contagious, but if you have a strong immune system more likely you would not get sick and if you are stressed and have low immune system, more likely you can get sick. Another aspect to consider, what is the endocrinology of a sad or depressed person? Simply Adrenal and cortisol. His immune system is low. Lastly, what is his physiology? How is his health? And if he has pain, how could stress contribute to his pain? Now, If he chooses to be just a little happier by any means as simple as watching a funny movie, talking with a friend or talk to a support group, would he feel better? I can tell from my own experience a big “YES”.

Does this make sense?

It is not that happy people do not have pain. They do, but we can clearly tell that happy people get dopamine and endorphins that are natural medicine and hopefully they feel less pain or for a shorter time.

Sometime, we have a mental challenge or a lot of stress at work, with family and friends, financial problems, that our body has less energy, less sleep, our immune system gets weak and then we get sick . When we go to a doctor for our illness or pain, they help us with the pain and they may not ask you or never find out the root cause of your pain. This is when the medication may work for a while, but if the problem exists the pain comes back. Does this make sense to you? Has this happened to you? Please bring to awareness the root cause and tell your doctor so he/she can help you with the best intentions and the best knowledge about your situation. Sometimes, your pain will jump around from location to location and sometime its intensity will be different in different circumstances or different time of the day and with different people, please bring those in mind to get to root causes. If you are with friends having fun, more likely you will have less pain and if you are alone or working where you do not enjoy or like your work, you would possibly have more pain. Preventing and resolving stress in all areas of life could be great prevention from diseases.

What if we look or think a little deeper?

What if our pain indirectly tied to a recent or past suppressed negative emotional trauma or stress?

When I lived in Costa Rica, one of my clients was on morphine injections for five years for her back pain. She was told by her doctor that they can not give her morphine injections anymore because the shots had damaged her liver and they wanted to stop damage to the liver. She was stressed out, the pain and added pain of not getting morphine injections stressed her even more. She also got more stress to find out that she has a liver problem and can not get pain relief. This caused her even more severe pain. When we started working, I asked her about her daily stress level form one to ten. She was not aware that she had stress, because she said she is just a homemaker and blessed with a great life and financially stable.

I asked her to hit a pillow that I was holding in my hand in front of her face (part of the therapy I do). She hit it a few times softly and insisted she had no pain. I asked her to continue for just a few more seconds. Wow, all of a sudden she started hitting the pillow so had that it really scared me being hit by her and before I told her to stop, she stopped and said her pain was gone. What happened? You ask. While she was hitting the pillow, she started saying I hate my husband, he constantly fights with my son. She said I hate my life, I am cut between old timer dad and new generation son who fight daily about what to do at work (not a peaceful life for a woman with great finance just going to Gym and living a great life, ha?). Her pain went away, because consciously or unconsciously, she was not admitting, accepting, agreeing to her problem of anger in her case that caused her a lot of stress that she was not even aware of. I saw her after two weeks and she was pain free and not in need of drugs. Some stress or at least effects of stress could not be so obvious. We all deal with day-to-day stress to the best of our abilities and capacities, but if we get overwhelmed with many different kinds of stress, this can be overwhelming. Now the arguments under stress can lead to fighting for some people and then it could cause separation or divorce and then another stress is added then the child custody comes up and then the health problem can come next. I do not mean to be negative here, but I have seen and was told these stories by many. You could be told by experts that they can not find anything wrong with you and you have idiopathic pain (the reason for pain is not obvious damage to body), then you may think they suggest your pain is not real and it is just in your head. I assure you, your pain is real, but I also tell you stress can cause a pain cycle and that might be the root cause of your pain (please consult with your medical doctor).

Marathon runners, ball players, swimmers with championship track record have chronic pain. Some with physical damage and some with daily stress. I do not know what type of pain you have, I propose that if you have positive attitude with smile and laughter and work on re- ducing your stress that will or could bring you relaxation then less or no pain. If you can reduce your stress levels, more likely you will have less pain too. Put it to a test drive for just a short while and see if it could serve or help you. Many people became pain free by finding the causes of stress in their life and reduce their stress from life and then they can release their pain. You might think this is just a theory and I have no proof. Please finish the book and it will get clear to you. I have experienced more pain with stress and less pain with happiness, how about you? Just try it for a day or two, would you please? You will gain from working on stress reduction to be more joyful in life and you de- serve it.

Please bring to awareness all the stresses in your life and write them down. Why do you believe you are in pain? What happened when you got hurt? What other issues were in your life that you did not like? What stresses you had at the same time or just before you got hurt or along with your pain?

Grieving a loss, financial problems, problems at work, other health issues, family problems, problems with friends, loneliness, frustration, stress anxiety, something from the past still on your mind? Does anyone close to you has or had problems that you are sharing or helping them? Sometimes other people’s problems become very stressful for us because we feel helpless and it is out of our control. If we have family members or friends dealing with drugs, drinking, with health problems to name a few, their problems could affect our stress and our pain intensity and duration. The gate control theory of pain

In 1965, Ronald Melzack (Canadian psychologist and former professor of psychology at McGill University) and Patrick David Wall (British neuroscientist, the world leading expert on pain) introduced the gate control theory of pain.

The previous theories of pain were based on effect of psychology on pain perception, but the gate control theory of pain offered a physiological explanation for the pain. Researchers have long observed that factors such as thoughts, emotions, expectations, personality and life stress experiences can influence our perceptions of pain. If your stress is high or you expect something to hurt a lot then it probably will hurt more than it should. If you are upset or frightened, pain may seem more intense than it would if you were calm.

Gate control theory of pain suggests that the spinal cord contains a neurological "gate" that either blocks pain signals or allows them to continue on to the brain. Unlike an actual gate, which opens and closes to allow things to pass through, the "gate" in the spinal cord operates by differentiating between the types of fibers carrying pain signals. Pain signals traveling via small nerve pain fibers are allowed to pass through while signals sent by large nerve (touch, cold and heat) fibers are blocked. Gate control theory is often used to explain the phantom or chronic pain. How pain mechanism works

Dr. Melzack and Dr.Wall suggest that before the information is transmitted to the brain, the pain messages encounter "nerve gates" in the spinal cord that control whether these signals are allowed to pass through or to be blocked.

When the gate is open ( stress, anxiety, negative feelings will open the gate), then the movement or flow of information will reach the brain without opposition and the signals are passed along without resistance and pain is experienced more intensely. When we are relaxed and we do not have much stress and anxiety in life, the gate will be close and the flow of information from the injury will be impossible and mini- mum information will go to the brain and this will cause less pain to be assigned to the injury.

Our nervous system has two divisions: Central nervous system, containing the spinal cord and the brain and peripheral nervous system containing all nerves outside of the brain and spinal cord. The gate control theory proves physically how our psychological factors can change the amount, intensity, duration, width or narrowness of the pain. Upon injury, pain messages originate in nerves associated with the damaged tissue and flow along the peripheral nerves to the spinal cord and from there through the gates of spinal cord up to the brain.

The pain messages also coming from the brain to the area of injury through spinal cord could be affected by a number of psychological factors that could also change the instructions coming down from the brain for variation in pain intensity.

Again, when the gates are opening, pain messages "get through" more or less easily and pain can be intense. When the gates close, pain messages are prevented from reaching the brain and may not even be experienced. The Peripheral Nervous System

Sensory nerves from the area of injury bring information about pain by at least two different fibers. Thin, fast pain fibers and thick, slow fibers (touch fiber). A-delta nerve (thin pain) fibers, which carry electrical messages to the spinal cord at approximately 40 mph ("first" or "fast" pain). C-fibers, which carry electrical messages at approximately 3 mph to the spinal cord ("slow" or "continuous pain”).

For example, when an injury happens to the back, the nerve endings that detect back pain involve many structures including the muscles, ligaments, the disks, the vertebrae, and the joints. When one of these parts is irritated, injured or inflamed, the pain message will be transmitted by peripheral nerves to the spinal cord and up to the brain. These messages can be blocked by other psychological (emotional)factors.

Our emotional well-being could cause the gate to be closed when we feel good or we are in happy mood or we do not have personal conflict, problems with the family or friends, our health is great, our work environment is well, otherwise problems in any areas of life will have the gate open and we will feel more pain compared with a person without problems. This is one of the main concepts on pain perception.

The pain is not objective (does not only depend on the amount of injury). The pain is subjective and depends on how much stress a person has in life, how much a person thinks it is going to hurt, how much support he/she will get from family, how his/her finance is or does the person have a job, is he going through divorce or grieving a loss. How happy a person is or his mindset and character before injury can affect amount, intensity and wideness of the area of pain. If you have a lot of negative emotions like anger, anxiety, sadness, trauma, depression, shame and so on, these negative emotions open the gate and more of nociceptors go to the brain and the brain then sends you more pain (pain perception). Dr. Apkar Apkarian neuroscientist

In 2008, Dr. Apkarian proposed the theory that chronic pain is a form of emotional learning. Dr. Apkar Apkarian uses multiple imaging modalities, neuroimaging, and FMRI findings. He says he can tell by the image of your brain that you will or will not have chronic pain in the future.

Dr. Apkarian and his colleagues at Northwestern University have found a series of abnormalities in the brains of chronic pain sufferers: the part of the prefrontal cortex linked to decision making appears to have shrunk in chronic pain patients and another part of the prefrontal cortex linked to emotion is hyperactive.

He suggests that the constant pain these people experience is linked to activity almost entirely in the emotion-regulating parts of the brain. Dr. Apkarian suggests that, it is important to treat acute pain early to prevent any permanent changes or damages to the nervous system.

Dr. Apkarian has spent many decades of his life researching Chronic pain with his research groups. You could consider him pioneer and authority in pain. When you follow his lectures and his interviews, you will get what I got from his researches.

My take from Dr. Apkarian's research is that he can tell with an accura- cy of 80 to 100% who will be a candidate for chronic pain, before he or she had any injury, because he looks at a person’s FMRI of brain and if a person’s brain shows shrinkage in decision making area and hyperactivity in emotions area of the brain, he or she will have a chronic pain after an injury and if someone has bigger decision making area in the brain and smaller emotional brain activity, he/she will not have chronic pain. Also realize, I have read many articles, research papers, magazines and have watched many videos about chronic pain. Several researches by other pain doctors concluded that if during the acute pain period of your illness, you have a lot of pain and usually people who suffer more during acute pain will have more complaints and are more emotional toward their pain so they will build neuropath of chronic pain. They will build neurology or neuropath of chronic pain with longer duration of the pain and intensity. So if you have acute pain, please work out with your doctor to see what he/she suggests or could do so that you would have less acute pain that could prevent you from having chronic pain in the future.

Elevated anxiety, depression, negative suppressed emotions from the past (from childhood to now), negative emotions like anger, sadness, fear, hurt, guilt and anything that can decreased quality of life in turn will change the brain structure and the quality of the brain performance that contribute to chronic pain that is not due to injury, but due to emotional pain. Who is Dr. Apkar Vania Apkarian?

Apkar Vania Apkarian is a professor of physical medicine, anesthesiology, physiology and rehabilitation at Northwestern university in New York. He has been a pioneer in the use of magnetic resonance Spectroscopy to study the neurochemistry of the brain using FMRI.

Dr. Apkarian earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California and earned a PHD in neuroscience from medical University in Syracuse in New York. He established neuroplasticity as a mechanism of chronic pain. His findings identified grey matter changes related to chronic back pain. His work was done in collaboration with Marwan Baliki, a research scientist at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, and Paul Geha, an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine.

Dr. Apkarian's research focused on the neuro imaging findings to improve preventative methods and treatments of chronic pain. His work has been focused on the better understanding of chronic pain. His work includes using multiple imaging modalities, neuroimaging, and key FMRI findings.

His research proposes that the present brain structure (logical activities, hyperactivity of negative emotions) does affect the outcome of chronic pain and chronic pain is a learned behavior.

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What did you learn? Was this useful? Please bring to awareness anything that could help you and it will. Could this help you with the pain? Please write them down and think about it for a few minutes while breathing deeply and very slowly as possible for you. Answering these questions and writing them down and then thinking about each question has reduced the pain for many of my clients.

Dr. Norman Doidge

Norman Doidge is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and author of "The Brain That Changes Itself “(2007) and "The Brain's Way of Healing" (2015). In his books he describes some of the latest developments in neuroscience. He became a New York Times and international bestseller.

He is currently on Faculty at the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry, and Research Faculty at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, Columbia University, New York. In his book in chapter one of "The Brain's Way of Healing", Dr. Norman Doidge writes about Dr. Michael H Moskowitz, a psychiatrist who turns to be a pain doctor by his findings of neuroplasticity of the brain. Dr. Michael H Moskowitz

Dr. Michael H Moskowitz, MD is a Doctor in Sausalito, CA, with another office in San Rafael, CA. He has 41 years of experience as a psychiatrist. One of his specialties is Pain Medicine. Dr. Moskowitz is affil- iated with UC Davis Medical Center and Sequoia Hospital. Dr. Moskowitz graduated from Louisiana State University medical Center in 1977. He has a master’s degree in public health from University of Tucson in 1972. He finished his psychiatry fellowship at St.Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco. Dr. Moskowitz is board certified in both psychiatry and pain medicine. He has served on American Academy of pain medicine continuing education committee. He has pioneered the development and use of animation to teaching and understand the principle of pain medicine. Dr. Moskowitz has been an assistant clinical professor for the department of anesthesiology and pain medicine at university of California Davis since 2006 teaching Neuroplasticity.

Dr. Moskowitz has designed and delivered courses for the physicians in California regarding pain. He has been lecturer in the annual confer- ence of American Academy of pain medicine. He has published 70 Journal articles and text book chapters focusing on Brain changes regarding pain and plasticity of the pain. Dr. Moscowitz and his partner Dr. Goldman have lectured on the topic of pain numerous times using neuroplasticity for treatment of patients with pain. He teaches physicians neuroplasticity of pain in UC Davis. Their website is the neuro- plastix.com

Chapter one of “The Brain’s Way of Healing” (by Dr. Norman Doidge ) is about Dr. Moscowitz.

“Physician got hurt, then healed himself”

Michael H. Moskowitz's story, a psychiatrist who later became a pain specialist. Dr. Moskowitz had pain for many years due to different incidents, so he experimented with brain and pain to change or eliminate his pain and he changed his career path from psychiatry to be a pain doctor.

Dr. Moscowitz has said, he has used himself as a guinea pig to find solutions for eliminating chronic pain. He has spent majority of his professional life in pain. He has experienced a lot of pain in a couple of incidents that happened to him and that gave him motivation and experience to search for answers, solutions for chronic pain relief.

After researching pain and reading all articles of his time about pain, he opened a clinic in Northern California to help people with pain. He mentions that people who come to his center are the people that, surgery, drugs or other alternative ways couldn't help them to get rid of their pain so for the last hope they go to see him. Dr. Moscowitz has advanced psychiatry fellowship in a psychosomatic medicine, but he became well known for use of neuroplasticity for treatment of the pain. He says that the brain assigns pain to injury and the brain is like a switch that turns the pain on and off. Dr. Moscowitz teaches his patients how they can turn this switch off and be pain free. His patients eliminate their pain by learning about neuroplasticity of pain. The intensity of pain depends on the mind switching and we can learn how to turn this switch off. Dr. Moscowitz's story:

The first time Dr. Moskowitz got hurt was in 1994 while water skating, he was speeding at forty mile an hour when he fell down on his head and hurting his right side of the neck. The pain was often 8 out of 10. The pain is rated from 1 to 10. One being minor pain and 10 feeling that you have fell in boiling oil. Morphine and heavy-duty painkillers and all the treatments like physical therapy, the massage, anti-inflam- matory drugs did not work for him and the pain hunted him for 13 years.

His second experience was in June 1999 when he was 49, he went to a military base where tanks were parked for the 4th of July parade in San Rafael. He got on one of the tanks and when he jumped off he was caught on a metal on the side of the tank and he broke his leg. He heard his bones cracking. He noticed that his left leg bone was in a 90 degrees angle compared to his right leg. He has talked about pain to his students, but he never experienced such a severe pain.

The first thing he thought about was, how he will get to work on Monday. The second thing he noticed while he was waiting for the ambulance: if he didn't move he didn't feel any pain.

When the ambulance came, they gave him 6mg of morphine. He asked for more pain killer and they said they cannot give him anymore, he told them that he was a pain doctor and they gave him more morphine. His pain was 10. He explains that the function of acute pain is to alert us of the immediate dangers.

The word pain comes from the ancient Greek word pointe: which means penalty or punishment, but the pain is not punishment. The pain lets us know that you are in dangerous circumstances and you should attend to your injury or stop doing something that would cause more hurt or injury to your body. That is why he knew as long as he didn't move he was in no danger of further damage and that is why he did not have pain while he was waiting for help. As long as he did not move, his brain knew that he has stopped, therefore the brain did not assign more pain to his body at the time.

The brain switch for pain was turned off. This motivated him to learn how to turn his pain switch off. He started researching and discovering that the brain plasticity could be altered to change the pain perception. He knew that the signals from the injured part of the body went to the brain and then the brain decided how much pain should the injury have by looking at damage to the body that was received by the nerves of peripheral nervous system and central nervous system (CNS).

Wishing to take charge of his own pain, in 2007 he read 15,000 pages of neuroscience. He wanted to understand laws of Neuroplasticity to change his pain. He developed on the idea that “The neuron that fires together wires together.”

The idea was established by Donald Olding Hebb a Canadian psychologist who was influential in the area of neuropsychology. It was introduced in his 1949 book The Organization of Behavior. It states that “The neuron that fires together wires together.” and the neurons that fire apart wires apart.

Dr. Moskowitz made three FMRI of the brain. One showing brain in acute pain with 16 areas of the brain being active for pain. Second one with brain in chronic pain that has 16 areas firing but with larger area being activated. The third one was an image of a healthy brain with no pain.

He observed that the pain areas also processed thoughts, sensations, images, memories, movements, emotions, and beliefs. These areas that regulate these activities have been hijacked to process the pain signal. That is why when we are in pain we get irritated and we cannot think clearly. He use the neuroscience of “use it or lose it”. He could use brain plasticity in his favor and to steal the neurons back that were dis- tracting the brain functions.

When he had pain, he forced himself to activate the brain areas that have been taken over by pain. He knew that acute pain steals five percent of neurons’ activity and chronic pain stole about 15 to 25 percent of neurons. He looked at the picture of a healthy brain then he looked at the image of a brain in chronic pain. He thought of 16 areas of brain that were taken over by pain (neurons that stole factions of brain) and he though and imagined that these brain areas were shrinking (the areas affected by chronic pain) to get the brain functions back when he was in pain. In the first three weeks his pain was reduced just a little, but he was determined to shrink the pain. It took him about six weeks and all the pain from his neck and shoulders was completely gone. Af- ter 13 years of pain, it was the first time his pain was gone and his life was changed.

His first neuroplastic patient

40 years old Jan Sander a registered nurse was his first patient from Redwood California. One day, when she was working with a patient, her patient accidentally fell down. She tried to prevented the patient from falling down, and when she got hold-of the patient, she said she heard her back snap like a rubber band. She felt something inside of her break and she was right, all five of her lumbar lower back discs where damaged and they were pressed against her nerves’ roots. She developed lots of pain on her legs and could not walk.

Jane was taken to the emergency room and she was diagnosed as having damage to all her discs. She was suggested to have a surgery. All the treatments for the pain including heavy duty opioids and physiotherapy did not help her. Nothing helped her pain and the pain become chronic. She was declared disabled and she felt her life was over. She was depressed and suicidal. The pain never went away. She spent the next decade at home, the only time she went out was to go to the doctor.

When she got to Dr. Moskowitz, she has been disabled with chronic pain for a decade. He introduced her to the idea of training herself, using his neuroplastic techniques. She had to counter her chronic pain mentally. She had to understand neuroplasticity of the brain and work with three brain images (heathy, acute and chronic pain images of the brain). She had to transform her brain with chronic pain to the no pain image. She had to hold on thinking about the image of the brain with no pain. She started brain images and by the third week, she had a few minutes of no pain and by 4th week her pain was gone. Her life returned to normal and she started doing what she could not do before.

How visualization decreases the pain:

The posterior parietal lobe of the brain processes both pain and visual perception. Jan visualized that her pain was shrinking from the posterior parietal lobe.

Hypnotists use visualization to help their clients to get rid of their pain. One method is, they ask the clients to imagine pain and ask the client to see, feel or imagine that pain is getting away in distance from their clients (disassociate from pain).The hypnotist’s clients have the image of their body in pain that is moving away from their body. This is called body image (not the actual physical body). The neuroscientist call this virtual body. Each person may have a different body image in their mind and that is not the same as their actual body image. Body image could be very different (subjective) than their actual physical image of their body. Virtual or body image is a mental picture of the person about their body. For example when a dentist works on their patient’s tooth, they give them anesthetic then the jaw of the patient feels a lot bigger in his/her mind. Also a person with anorexia feels fat, no matter how skinny he/she is. These are examples of differences between body image perception and actual physical body. Neuro scientists and pain specialists headed by Lorimer Moseley in Australia had done experiments with body image in 2008. They asked patients to look at their hands and move all fingers and then look at their hand with binoculars without magnifying class- es. Then, they asked them to look at their fingers with magnifying glasses twice magnified and when they looked at their fingers' movement, the pain was increased. Finally the patients look at their fingers while moving them through the wrong end the binoculars and their hand looked smaller this time, the patients’ pain was decreased. When the size of the fingers was seen smaller the pain was reduced and when the size was increased the pain also increased. This shows that the experience of pain is not only from sensory inputs of the pain, but it is influenced by the body image. Interestingly, when the patients looked at their fingers from the magnifying side, the hand swelling was also increased.

Another experiment by the University of Nottingham England had the same finding. They placed the hand of an older lady and showed her a picture of her hands on a screen. The researchers found when the image of hand was stretched or magnified by special effect, the patient reported less pain. It did not matter if the image of hand was stretched or magnified or decreased, the patient had reduced their pain due the perception and size of the fingers. Dr. Catherine Preston explained. Us- ing screen images could cause the patients to reduce their pain to half of what it was in 85% of the patients.

When Jan concentrated on an image of the brain with no chronic pain, her pain went away too. Dr. Moskowitz says that many of his relatively pain-free patients still have damage to their body which can occasionally trigger an actual pain, but they have been using his method to block their pain successfully. He says he does not believe in pain management anymore, he believes in trying to cure the persistent pain. His patients have been successful in all areas of pain syndrome, but only when they worked very hard on mental imagery to get rid of the pain. They have been able to unwire or rewire the neurology of their pain. His patients use his method to create a pleasure chemistry to reduce or get rid of their pain using his simple method of neuroplasticity. Jan was visited in 2011 and her pain never returned. She had a lot of mental energy and is free of pain.

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Dr. Lorimer Moseley neuroscientist

Dr. Lorimer Moseley wants to convince people that pain is an illusion 100% of the time. The highlight of his work is that the brain assigns pain not to the injury, but to what it thinks the injury is and that depends on our perception of the injury.

Who is Dr. Lorimer Moseley?

Professor Lorimer Moseley is a clinical scientist investigating pain in humans at The University of Oxford, and the University of Sydney. He is senior Principal Research Fellow, Professor of Clinical Neurosciences & Foundation Chair in Physiotherapy, University of South Australia.

He has published over 300 papers, five books and numerous book chapters. He has given over 140 lectures in 30 countries and has provided professional education in pain sciences to over 15,000 medical and health practitioners. His research group’s outreach videos and articles have attracted over 3.5 million views. He was the first physio- therapist to be made an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Pain Medi- cine (ANZCA).

Dr. Lorimer Moseley's personal story

Dr. Lorimer Moseley explains his own story to prove his point. He was walking in a forest in Australia when he felt something punched his left leg. He explains when we got injured, the information from the area of injury (his left leg) went to the spinal cord by nociceptors and from there to thalamus and then the frontal lobe to analyze how big the problem is so that the brain could assign the right amount of pain to the injured area. Then the brain signals are sent to the injured area (pain to the left leg) to alert the person about the seriousness of the problem so that he can take care of his injury. First, the brain checks to see if it has had similar experience like the present injury. If it has had a similar injury and that was not a bad injury no pain or mild pain will be assigned to the injury so that the person could continue with his activity.

Dr. Moseley said he did not feel pain because he thought his left leg was scratched or punctured by a torn of a bush so he continued and went for a swim. He swam for a while then he came out and that's all he remembers . He woke up in the hospital and he found out that he survived the most dangerous snake bite in Australia known as the Eastern Brown snake (second-most venomous land snake after the In- land Taipan. This snake is responsible for about 60% of snake-bite deaths in Australia). Now he says after six months from that snake bite, he was walking in the forest again with a friend. He felt lots of pain on his feet and he was screaming for a minute from the pain of his left foot. His brain assigned a lot of pain to his leg (because he thought he was bitten by a snake this time). His friend checked his leg and told Dr. Moseley that he has been scratched by a bush and he should be ok . So, because he thought he was bitten by a snake this time, his thought caused him a lot of pain, not the actual injury. Through many experiments and research with his team he says that the brain assigns pain not to the injury, but what it think the injury is and that depends to our perception of the injury.

The perception of pain is very important to realize and it does not depend on the injury, but the brain makes association with our past experiences and our assumption of how much we should hurt. Again, when the first time, he did not see or think about the snake bite, he did not have any pain, but the second time because he thought that a snake bit him, he was in a lot of pain. His brain (a neuroscientist brain) caused him a lot of pain with no significant injury. The brain’s job is to keep a person safe and even though there was not any immediate danger he had a lot of pain . As a neuroscientist, he has done a lot of research about pain. He has written many articles and has lectured all around the world about pain. His research concluded that the pain is a perception and the amount of pain that we feel is related to our pain perception of the brain and how the brain thinks. The intensity of the pain is related to our perception of pain and not actual injury 100% of the time.

Chronic pain costs Australia forty billion dollars a year that is more than the cost of cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes combined. It is very important to understand the perception of pain. If someone is sensitive or hyper sensitive and has a lot of negative emotions, the intensity of pain will be higher than it should be and he's going to have lot more pain compared to the person that takes it easy and doesn't think the damage is so bad.

Dr. Moseley has experimented and researched the pain perception. He has asked volunteers to give their feeling of pain by applying a cold metal object to one of the volunteer's hands. While he applied a cold object to each volunteer’s hands to create pain in their hands, he showed them either color red or color blue and he noticed when the color red was shown, all of the volunteers felt more pain and when color blue was shown with the same amount of coldness the volunteers had less pain. So, the pain they felt was not real indication of cold, but the effect of what was going on in their environment (the col- or red or blue).

In another experiment with artificial limbs (plastic arm or leg), he pen- etrated a volunteer’s artificial limb with something sharp and they felt the pain. How is it possible for someone to feel pain in a part of body that does not exist? This is another indication that brain can assign pain (phantom pain) to the part of the body that does not exists. I think if he did an experiment with the same amount of pain to his volunteers who had different levels of stress, he would have found out that if a volunteer had less stress he would report less pain compared with the person who had more stress.

I have listened to many of his lectures and in one of his lectures, he said that if a person that has a back pain sees another person who is lifting something heavy the person observing this action can feel pain in his body by merely seeing another person lifting a heavy weight. The pain can be totally different depending to the meaning each volunteer give to pain perception due to life stresses, person’s threshold, personality (being logical or feeling oriented). The feeling of pain is very subjective and each person can have different amount of pain depending on their objectivity that is affected by stress. He wants to convince you that pain is an illusion 100% of the time, so the brain assigns pain by projecting how much it should hurt.

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“As you begin to heal the inner you, you alter your immune system.” - Dr. Wayne Dyer

Dr. John Sarno surgeon

Dr. John Sarno was professor of rehabilitation medicine at the New York University school of medicine. He was practicing medicine since 1950, He wrote many books on pain. One of his books, “Mind over back pain” was the number one New York best seller book .

Here are some of his books: Mind Over Back Pain: A Radically New Approach to the Diagnosis and Treatment of Back Pain Apr 1, 1986

The Mind body Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain Oct 1, 1999

Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection Feb 1, 1991

The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of best seller Disorders Mar 27, 2007

Dr. John Sarno's Top 10 Healing Discoveries Mar 7, 2016

Psychology of psychosomatic disorder

In Chapter 3 of his book “The divided Mind “Dr. Sarno talks about one of his patients, a 28 years old Engineer and a very intelligent person who had back and severe foot pain for eight months. This Engineer fol- lowed all the routines of going to doctors and specialists, but he could not get relief from his pain and nothing improved his pain.

This 28 years old engineer was told to have a back surgery, but he decided to see Dr. Sarno, because he read Dr. Sarno’s book. He wondered if his pain was due to TMS. So when he met Dr. Sarno, he expressed dissatisfaction with his job and said he was in charge of four people and that one of them was older than him and he just didn't feel right about the responsibility of telling them what to do. He wanted to be told what to do not to tell others how to do their job. At his job, he eventually developed this severe pain on his leg and his back. While he was explaining to Dr. Sarno about his responsibility and desire to quit his job, all of a sudden his pain from his leg disappeared and his back pain eventually went away. In different parts of his book, Dr. Sarno mentions that psychosomatic (mind-body) pain is due our negative emotions or suppressed negative emotions and with his methods of education, writing about negative emotions for 30 days, going back to normal activities (work, hobbies), spending time in support group and psychotherapy one can eliminate his/her pain. The research on his methods had shown about 54% success rate which is more than any other method of pain reduction or elimination according to his books. To understand his methods, one should learn and understand about TMS.

TMS:Tension myositis syndrome, also known as tension myoneural syndrome or mind body syndrome.

This is a name given by Dr. Sarno that he described as musculoskeletal and nerve symptoms problem, that causes one to have back pain or any other pain. TMS Theory:

According to Dr. John Sarno, TMS is repressed or suppressed negative emotions, primary rage and anger. These emotions initiate the process that causes physical pain and other symptoms. So, when a person has rage, the blood flow to vital organs is decreased (fight-freeze-flight response). When organs and muscles are deprived of oxygen, eventually, the pain is created in the body. The pain sometimes can move to different areas of the body up or down that is why he concluded that negative emotions conscious or unconscious cause pain. Anxiety, worries, and stress can affect intensity of the pain. If a person is angry or has any strong negative emotions and suppressed emotions. If the feelings are not attended correctly, these emotions will cause back pain or other pains in the body. The unconscious mind can create this pain as a distraction from the original cause that could be related to anger, rage or some ongoing negative emotion like sadness, guilt, hurt and depression. The pain is a distraction from the deep emotions. This pain is called “distraction pain syndrome”.

Dr. Sarno explained in detail about TMS and how to take care of it in his four books. His solution to chronic pain is summarized here: 1. Education 2. Writing in a journal about pain for 30 days or more. 3. Doing what a person did before having pain (work, hobbies with advice of physicians). 4. Use psychotherapy. 5. Getting together with a support group and talking about pain.

1. Education: After checking the patient for physical injuries, infection and tumor all the physical problems that could cause pain, if no obvious reason found medically then he considers the patient for TMS. The patient is given all the information about psychosomatic (involving both mind and body pain, psychogenesis, pain development from mental as distinguished from physical origins) of pain and TMS (Ten- sion myositis syndrome, tension myoneural syndrome or mind-body syndrome).

2. Writing a journal concerning pain and stresses in daily life to bring stress and pain to consciousness that will help to understand real causes of the pain. Free writing could help the patients to get rid of their rage and negative emotions. Emotions that could hunt a person forever.

3. He suggests that the person with pain should go back doing what he used to do (please consult with your physician and be careful) and start going back to work or doing the hobbies you used to do. To go back to your normal life, of course you need to talk to your physician and or a professional before doing exercise or going back to work. Ba- sically, from all of his books you'll get the impression that Dr. Sarno says your pain will be reduced eventually or will be eliminated and you will get your mobility back. If you do some activities rather than being inactive. His methods have worked for 80% of his patients and for other 20% he uses two other steps.

4. He uses psychotherapy by his trained psychologists in his center to help his patients to eliminate their pain.

5. He has the patients to form a support group and talk about their stress and pain in the group and they feel better and let the pain go.

Dr. David Shuster a medical doctor and former student of Dr. John Sarno did a research on the study of TMS treatment and he found out that it was successful for 54 percent of people with chronic back pain and that is higher result than effect of medicine and other treatments in the market for chronic pain.

Dr. Sarno has had good success rate with pain patients and has treated many famous people with TMS. Howard Stern was one of his patients. Dr. Sarno has said, TMS can cause numerous problems in one area or all over the body. It can cause pain, stiffness, tingling, numbness and weakness.

Also the pain location can happen in the neck, wrist, the back and all that part of the body. He believes TMS is due to emotional problems that will cause the pain and the pain could move from one part of the body to another. The negative emotions is the criteria for TMS. If you have a medical examination and doctors can not find a known physical cause for your pain it is likely that your stress or emotional problem is causing your pain. I have helped many people to reduce or eliminate their pain by hypnotherapy. Many of my clients told me, they do not believe hypnotherapy can help with their pain and some said their pain was a physical pain and hypnotherapy could not help, but I proved them otherwise and we celebrated the victory of them going back to their life and freedom from pain and medications.

Who was Dr. John Sarno:

Dr. John Sarno M.D. College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University – 1950 Certification: American Board of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine, New York University School of Medicine Attending Physician, Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, New York University Medical Center Dr. Sarno spend all his professional life to help people with pain. He did not consider himself an academic, but he observed his patient and with his TMS he helped numerous people to get their life back.

Please watch documentary film about Dr. john saris work named ”All The Rage: Saved by Sarno Documentary” ✽✽✽

Pete Egoscue Pain Relief Expert

The article below was taken from an interview with Pete Egoscue.

Pain Relief Expert, Educator and Bestselling Author http://www.shareguide.com/Egoscue.html For more information about Pete Egoscue, visit his website at www.egoscue.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUXIMKv1jK4 (Neck and shoulder pain relief video, he has many, please check them all out).

Mr. Pete Egoscue has many videos on YouTube. He speaks with 100% confidence and I love how he explains his valuable exercises to release pain with lots of testimonials. He looks very relaxed, in control and has very soft spoken manner. He could have the miracle answers to your chronic pain. Please do enjoy this valuable authority in pain. Mr. Pete Egoscue got wounded in Vietnam, and he had a lot of pain and limitation, but he decided not to accept that as a way of life and he searched for answers.

Mr. Pete Egoscue thinks the message we're getting from pain is the body's voice saying, "I can no longer compensate with what you've given me, and you need to address the situation." It's not that you are diseased, not that you're broken, but you have to pay attention to the body's voice because you've ignored all the other signposts that it threw up for you along the way-you went right through them, or you didn't recognize them. So now your mind is using pain, the loudest voice it has, and you will pay attention to this.

He says that limitations in life come before pain. For example, what we often think about aging, we used to be able to get up on a step ladder, but now we can't. And we think, I'm getting old; I'm not supposed to be able to do that. We used to run, now we walk, or we used to walk, and now when we are old we can not ride a bike. But we think that's normal as long as there isn't any pain. Well, it's not! The limitations are what we should pay attention to first. Limitation stops inactions and inactivity can bring pain (we are told to be inactive while in pain or have limited activities). what's happened to us is that our posture that were designed to hold us upright have grown increasingly out of balance and symmetry. We are moving, working and exercising, but with wrong posture and in- correct posture bringing to the movement that's causing the pain.

The body works on a brilliant principle of what's called "vertical load." The skeleton has two jobs as a musculoskeletal system. One is to hold weight, and the other is to absorb the shock of movement. It does this with joints called load joints, such as shoulder, hip, knee, and ankle. The law of vertical load says that in order for these joints to enjoy their range of motion, they must line up or stacked one over the top of the other. This design requirement is the same for all humans. Range of motion takes place from the inside out. The big posture muscles are the ones that no one can see. They're located down deep next to the skeleton. As they lose their function, the body begins to compensate. So what happens is a series of steps that are taken by the body because it's such an incredibly adaptable machine. The muscles of the outside, the ones you can see, eventually begin to do the work of vertical load, of stabilization, compensating for the inside muscles that have become dysfunctional. You end up acquiring a posture that is visible to an evaluation: one hip in a different position than the other, or one shoulder forward or higher than the other one. And this eventually leads to pain.

Let's say that we have a shoulder dysfunction, and the right shoulder, because of compensation, is in a different position than the left shoulder. Now let's take that person to the gym, and let's participate in a weight training program. What will happen is that the body will figure out a way to push those weights around or implement the exercise the person wants to do. The problem is that the muscles being recruited in one shoulder girdle are different than the muscles in the other shoulder girdle. You're still making exactly the same motion, but you are recruit- ing different muscles because of the posture position of the joints. So without realizing it you end up increasing the dysfunction as you strengthen those muscles in that position.

Unfortunately, most people in today's culture live with posture imbal- anced, because of the demands of the culture or lack of demands of the culture. Eventually there's going to be the signal of pain. And what happens when the signal of pain comes is that we make that classic mistake, which is stopping activity. There needs to be an awareness that we are bilateral, and that we are designed to be symmetrical. There is a huge penalty for not being symmetrical. So how does a person tell? It's very simple. Take off your shoes and socks, get on a hard surface, shut your eyes, and determine where the weight distribution is in your feet. Is it more towards the left or right? If you're anatomically balanced, the weight is evenly distributed left to right, and it's pri- marily centered on the balls of both feet. If this is not the case, you are an anatomically imbalance. That means your immune system is being compromised, and your basic metabolisms are being compromised, and eventually there's going to be some kind of pain. People say, I can't run downhill without pain; I can't go to the gym and do military presses without pain; I can't go to my office and sit in my chair; I can't drive my car without pain. The pain isn't the villain here. Pain is the signal that the body cannot function properly.

If your postural is not correct, you already have limitations that have nothing to do with pain. For instance, you may have a hard time sleeping, you may be hypertensive, you may have diabetes. Many of the things that can't be explained because there's no mechanism to be fixed, are actually a result of postural imbalance. It's because we've compromised our basic metabolism. The primary indicator of musculoskeletal metabolic health is the reaction of demand. So there are all these signals that we are off balance, even before actual physical pain starts. But eventually the pain is coming.

He uses three “R” to help his clients rediscover, restore and return to health. Rediscovering the design, that's the postural balance, that vertical load we talked about. And then, once you are aware of this, to restore the body to its function requires an absolute belief that this imbalance has nothing to do with poor design, nothing to do with our age, and nothing to do with genetics. It has to do with the reaction of the stimulus to our environment. So once that awareness happens, now you have two choices: you can change the stimulus or you can change the environment. Those are the only two choices you have. Well, most of us won't change our environment because it's not practi- cal, so we've got to change the stimulus-to return ourselves to balance musculoskeletal systems. Lastly, the return to health requires not just the change of physical stimulus, it also requires an emotional change. We have to change our MIND. That is the key. We need to realize that we're not fragile, we're not overly complicated, and we do have all the abilities necessary to get well. He does not think health is the absence of pain; but health is the absence of limitation.

The body always remembers its design memory, so when you start changing the stimulus with E-cises methods, the body has no choice, it changes. The goal is not to get rid of the pain, and it's not to allow the person to be able to do all the things they want to do again, even though both those things happen. The goal is to allow the body to return to its birthright, its design template, and it can because it never forgets the memory. All we are doing is providing the necessary stimulus, personalized to the postural dysfunction, and the client is implementing those stimulus by doing the E-cises. So the body goes, "I get it; I understand what you want me to do." At the Egoscue University they have got four or five hundred students at the moment and a lot of them are physicians in hospitals. he says, he hears two reasons for chronic pain from our students. First, people don't take good care of themselves. Second, they don't comply with recommendations. The physician sits the patient down and tells him he needs to eat more green vegetables, get more rest, or whatever it is. But the patient comes back and has the same bad chemistry. The physician says, "Did you get more rest?" "Well, no." "Did you eat more fruits and vegetables?" "No." Humans spend their whole lives seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. We've convinced ourselves culturally that we're healthy if we don't have pain. (Now pain can be psychological pain, like depression or low self-esteem. I am not just talking about physical pain.) We believe that the solution to our problem rests outside of ourselves. So do we wait too long to seek help outside of ourselves? No, I don't think so. I think we wait until our pain, whatever it is, has so compromised the environment that we've created for ourselves that we need to seek help. In other words, "I have got to deal with this now, because it is getting in the way of my life." So it isn't that we're dumb or that there's a lack of information out there, or that there aren't wonderful people to help us. It's that we believe that our solutions to our pain rest outside of ourselves. And, of course, that isn't true.

The biggest problem with pain killers is that people think "OK, the pain's gone now, I'm well again." So it keeps people from addressing the core issue. Pain killers are a real problem in that regard, but they are sometimes incredibly beneficial as well. The chronic use of pain killers is incredibly detrimental to the endocrine system, the immune system of the body. It's brutal.

If you're walking but your feet point outward, then you're not using the posture muscles of your body, so your machine is relatively ineffi- cient. If you're walking for strictly cardio purposes, you're not getting much bang for your buck if your posture is off because you're like an untuned car going down the road. But if you're functional, and your feet point straight ahead, then you're getting a tremendous benefit very quickly. This is because, just by the nature of the posture, the di- aphragm is working so you're using the automatic breathing muscle- you're getting full lung expiration, the load on the heart is even and complete, the heart muscle understands the demand, and it ramps up to the demand in a clear, non-confusing way for the body.

They have got surgeons in their university, so if you speak to them they'll say that there are very few unnecessary surgeries. The acute care system is a symptomatic system. It is based on the premise that at the origin of every symptom there is a disease, there is a problem. And it's based on that model of homeostasis which is stability through con- sistency. So medicine interprets that to mean that physiological regula- tion is to clamp each parameter at a set point-to set all the vital processes of the body at a particular point. And then since errors (one way or the other) are from that point, you need to correct them. All the therapies, such as surgery, are designed to restore the inappropriate value to a normal value. Now there's a whole new science out there, based on the term allostasis, originally coined by Pete Egoscue Ster- ling, a professor of neurosciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Al- lostasis means stability through change, which means that there is no set point-the mechanisms are designed to change and control the vari- able, meaning the body is adaptable.

What typically happens in standard care is that when a patient sees their physician (a good physician, very well qualified) and that physician believes that there is something broken that needs to be fixed, they will often prescribe surgery. For example: a person shows up with nerve pain running down one of their legs. The physician quickly de- termines that's sciatica or ephemeral nerve pain, nerve referral down the leg. The physician is trained to believe that something is broken that needs to be fixed. MRIs and CAT scans, the diagnostic tools (they're marvelous, they're wonderful things) are used to trace the problem to its origin: "Oh, look! There's a disc up against the nerve root."

It's up to the expertise of the physician as to what to do. The surgeon says, because he or she has done it a million times, "I can relieve that symptom by going in there and getting that disc off of that nerve root." And they're absolutely right; they can do that. This is elective surgery. And six months later the pain is back. Why did it come back? Did the surgeon do an unnecessary surgery? No, the surgeon did exactly what he or she said they were going to do, and they did a good job of it. The pain is back because they didn't ask the next question: "Why did that disc do that?" In their homeostatic model they are treating symptoms as if they were causes and they're not-unless you were hit by a truck, and there was some external stimulant. In the case of a car wreck you know that the source of the pain and the cause of the pain were the same thing you've got a compound fracture, or something like that. But in most cases that's not it. So this is a roundabout answer as to whether there are unnecessary surgeries. I'll say that there are no unnecessary surgeries because what the patient and the surgeon decide on is, in 99% of the cases, perfectly and optimally performed. They do exactly what they say they are going to do. But what I think is that you know more about your health than anybody else. (Even though our culture doesn't believe that you do.) So to start asking the right questions, you've got to help your healthcare professional. You can't com- plain about chronic pain if you are not helping the situation. If you consult a physician or a therapist of any kind and you don't participate, what you are really doing is you are handicapping that professional's ability to help you. You have to ask the "why" questions, and you have to be an active participant. Now the tragedy of all this is that we are well-schooled on how to do that in every area of our life, except with our healthcare. We've convinced ourselves that we're fragile and complicated, and because of that only experts can help us solve our problems. It's just not true. When physicians often ask me why I think alternative care is explod- ing in growth, that's the answer I give them. Because many people are no longer comfortable with the expert/patient relationship. The only dialogue that an expert and a patient have is, "What is the symptom?" In the complementary care world, as you pointed out, the symptom is just part of the matrix. And that's why, in my view, that paradigm is growing so quickly.

I believe that the current paradigm has already shifted. We're moving from the paradigm of expert-driven care to the new one of patient-driven care. They're going through the roof because, in spite of all of the "scientific research" to the contrary, human beings instinctively understand that something that's grown organically is better for you than something that's not. Pete Egoscue, an anatomical physiologist since 1978, is the creator of the Egoscue Method for safe, effective, and permanent relief from chronic pain without prescription painkillers or invasive surgery. His exercise therapy program is acclaimed worldwide, and he has been consulted by some of the biggest names in sports. His books include Pain Free, The Egoscue Method of Health Through Motion, Pain Free for Women, and Pain Free at Your PC.

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Norman Cousins, UCLA professor

I read the book “Anatomy of an illness” by Mr. Norman Cousins about 30 years ago, his book was written in 1979 about 40 years ago. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for over 40 weeks. His book is about, how one man proved your mind can cure your body as perceived by the patient reflection on the healing and regeneration.

Mr. Norman Cousins was not a medical doctor, but with laughter and right nutrition and vitamins he cured his diseases. He believed that our bad attitude toward life causes diseases and cure is within ourselves. Mr. Norman Cousins at age 11, was misdiagnosed with tuberculosis. Despite this, he claimed that as a young boy he "set out to discover happiness and health.”

Cousins received a bachelor’s degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City. He was in the staff of the New York Post in 1934. Cousins was a lifetime believer in the power of hope, and optimism. One of his well-known lines, "Life is an adventure in forgive- ness”.

Cousins joined the University of California, Los Angeles faculty in 1978 and became a professor in the Department of Psychiatry. From what I know, he is the only person the only one person in the world that without an academic degree in psychology or medicine, healed himself and then was recognized value to teach in the UCLA medical school. His research interest was the connection between attitude and health.

Cousins did research on the biochemistry of human emotions, which he long believed were the key to human beings' success in fighting illness. It was a belief that he maintained even as he battled a crippling connective tissue disease, which was also referred to as a collagen disease in 1964. Experts, doctors told him that, he had one chance in 500 of recovery. Cousins developed his own recovery program. He took massive intra- venous doses of Vitamin C and watched various comedies to laugh. His positive attitude was not new to him, however. He had always been an optimist, known for his kindness to others, and his strong love of life itself. He reported, ”I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep,” and “When the pain-killing effect of the medicine wore off, we would watch another comic show, that would lead to another pain-free interval”. His struggle with that illness is detailed in his 1979 book Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient.

Later in life, he and his wife Ellen together fought his heart disease, again with exercise, a daily regimen of vitamins, and with the good nutrition provided by their organic garden, he prolonged his life. He wrote a collection of best-selling non-fiction books on illness and healing, as well as a 1980 autobiographical memoir, Human Options

Norman Cousins survived years longer than his doctors predicted: 10 years after his first heart attack, 26 years after his collagen illness, and 36 years after his doctors first diagnosed his heart disease. If we keep a better attitude, exercise and eat right we could overcome diseases.

✽✽✽ What did you learn? Was this useful? Please bring to awareness anything that could help you and it will. Could this help you with the pain? Please write them down and think about it for a few minutes while breathing deeply and very slowly as possible for you.

Helpful value, what stress does to the body!

I added this section very last minute since I believe when we have awareness of what the stress is we can manage and control it better. Stress is a physical, chemical, or emotional factor (internal or external) that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation. If day-to-day stress continues, it can become a chronic stress and that can cause many problems and illnesses. Stress can be positive (Eustress, eu-meaning good) can be negative or it can be neutral.

A good stress example, your kid is going to college away from home, it is great, but you stress out about your kid's future and do not like your kid going far away. Your child is getting married and wedding prepa- ration can be stressful. We all know negative stress like loss of loved ones, divorce, loss of a job and so forth. Neutral stress could be weath- er change, but we adapt and adjust to it. Some other examples include work related normal stress of getting a client, having good relation- ships, driving your kid to school.

Stress could cause physical symptoms, emotional symptoms, thought changes, and behavioral effects. Some examples of physical symptoms are: Our body becomes tense especially around the neck and shoulders Tension headache and my migraines Dizziness Trouble sleeping What physical symptoms do you have when you have stress?

Emotional symptoms: Some examples are: Feeling discouraged Frustrated or angry Disappointed or sad Feeling of hurt and guilt It could have different emotions for you. How do you feel when you are stressed? Please write them down. Thought changes (negative self-talks) Negative feeling and generalizing everything They don’t like me at work. My life or my husband doesn't like me. My children are not listening to me (sometimes they may not, but other times they do). I am not good for anything (you forget your achievements).

Everybody's against me (if you handle yourself, people will love you and there are people who love you). What negative thoughts come to your mind? Please write them down so that you are aware that they are just negative thoughts and not logical or true most of the time.

Negative behavioral changes, some examples are: We don't like to talk to anybody. No desire to do something useful or something that brings joy. We may eat more food or no food for a while or eating just junk food. We may take some actions that we will regret in the future.

What negative behavioral changes happen in you?

Please write them down so you can prevent them from happening in the future. The highlights and truths about stress is that nobody wants to have negative physical symptoms, negative feelings, negative thoughts and negative behaviors. The stress happens most of the time automatically before even we are aware of it.

For example, when someone does something we do not like that means we did not expect the personal to do what they did. We expected better behavior from the other person but not everybody has the same standard so as a result, V go to fight-freeze-flight mode automatically and the body produced adrenal and cortisol. This is called a stress response versus relaxation response. When stressed out, our brain does not look for solutions-but fast quick response a reptilian brain takes over logical brain (inherited from the cavemen). Just knowing this gives us a super advantage to be able to turn our automatic re- actions to control which is to our benefit. All reaction stress is truly automatic but with practice we can bring this automation under our control. This is what many people have done easily with deep and slow breathing 5 to 10 times or meditation, prayer affirmations, and walking about five to ten minutes from the situation if you could take a walk. I love my dog and she has taught me an easy method; this is called shaking it off. Just shake it off if it's not serving you. Be good to yourself, loved ones, people around you. Stress is not what happens to us, but the reaction we show that causes the problem not the circumstances. Everyone does have stress, but not everyone reacts to it the same way. With simple practices of breathing, walking, you can overcome anything and you know at the end if you get angry, frustrated, think bad, behave bad and all the physical symptoms are gone, we get tired and start new so congratulation you have handled many stresses in life, but if you learn to handle it earlier with better strategies you could save a lot of time, money and be happier and healthier.

Please read the biography of Mr. Patrick Bet-David. He is an entrepreneur and trainer worth 70 million dollars. When he was 12 his family fled to Germany and he was in refugee camps for years. I can not imagine the stress, sadness and traumas that he went through at 12 years of age. They came to USA with no money and he made it with the value of being optimistic. He is a family man that helps his family members and helps startup companies to prosper. He has many vlogs on YouTube.

Please also read the biography of John Keats. He was an English Ro- mantic poet next to William Shakespeare. When he was very young his dad died, then his mom a few years later and then he lost his brother to tuberculosis. He did not have any luck with the woman he loved either. He died at the age of 25 also from tuberculosis. I did not want to get you down, but all of his poems are about optimism and seeing the world as a great opportunity to live.

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.”

How would we react if some of those things happened to us? I coin the word “negative capacity”, negative capability says that for some things, those correct answers might not be available. In fact, they might not exist at all. It is not the event, but your reaction and resilience (bounce back) to the worst circumstances make you better and better. If something is good anyone can handle it, but when is bad and you can still handle it, you have the best capacity that is negative capacity.

This is just a reminder: Our autonomic nervous system has two parts, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is part of the nervous system that regulates activities of internal organs is largely autonomous acting (automatic) independently of the body’s consciousness and voluntary control. It has two main divisions sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic nervous system that re- quire alertness and energy such as facing danger or doing physical activities. Parasympathetic nervous system is the opposite of sympathetic nervous system for rest and digest (growth and production).

Our nervous system is automatic, Please remember this it is automatic. Sympathetic nervous system is a part of the nervous system that serves to accelerate the heart rate, constrict blood vessels, and raise blood pressure. If you are under stress, this is what happens: Stress response or fight-freeze-flight. Most of the blood goes to certain areas in the body like leg muscles and arms ready to fight or run. Heart rate goes up. Pulse rate increases. Blood vessels get smaller. Blood pressure goes up. Insulin resistance increase Thyroid may get activated Metabolism changes. Graving could increase or decrease. Shallow chest breathing. Lack of oxygenate to vital organs including the brain. Lack of nutrition to vital organs. Immune system becomes less active (warning this is when we get sick easily) The mouth gets dry. Digestive system does not work. Growth hormones are on the hold Skin temperature decrease in some parts of the body. Muscles contract especially in the shoulder or the neck area Less focus

Stress hormones are released (mainly adrenal and cortical ). I like to remind you how cells in our body die and we get sick without getting technical about it. The body cells (about 60 to 100 trillion cells), die only for two different reasons. The first one is, when we are conceived in the mother's womb the cells form organs and all the body parts by splitting and the old one is replaced by new one; old cells die which is the natural course of life. The second reason the cells die is what happens to us or what we do. The cells die for lack of oxygenated nutrition, we poison our body with bad intake of oxygen (smoking of any kind), bad food (too much fat and not enough fruits and vegetables), direct damage to body due accident and temperature (burns) or we expose ourselves to bacterias. Now, when we are stressed repeatedly, our body lacks oxygen (we breathe shallow and fast and not enough oxygen gets to vital organs like heart, liver) and the cells die (dis-eases can form). When we stress out we will lack dopamine (natural body healer) and we produce adrenal and cortisol in excess (would you say this can act as poison to kill our cells?). Then, our body becomes tense and blood circulation does not flow easily and as a result, nutrition can not be transported form our body (would you say this can cause sickness). Now, the final assault is since the dead of cells were not pro- grammed, these dead cell cause the neighboring cells to die. Once again, when these cells die, they can cause the cells nearby to die too. What do you think of that, would this clear it up for you to choose better and healthier alternatives of rest and nutrition?

I am sure you want to enjoy your life to the max. Now write down what you are going to do about it. The opposite side is the relaxation response. There are two choices here either you go through all the effects above and you lose or waste energy then you get exhausted or get sick from low energy. It can take anywhere from few minutes to days and many sleepless nights or you learn how to breathe deep and slow, walk, meditate or whatever you enjoy. Choose to remove the negative distraction and immediately replace it with another positive distraction, breathe deep, walk, call a loved one, start laughing at situations and life, I do hahaha. You will see with a few simple things you can get parasympathetic relaxation response. Parasympathetic system (relaxation) is the subdivision of the autonomic nervous system concerned with activities that, in general, inhibit or oppose the physiological effects of the sympathetic nervous system. It is not automatic but with practice it can be. What do you think? Is this better for you? By the way, the reason I ask many questions is that if you answer it, you are deeply thinking or internalizing and that brings it to the awareness.

Now, what happens under parasympathetic response or rest and digest response (relaxation response): Heart rate goes down Pulse goes down Blood vessel size goes back to normal size Blood pressure reduces Right amount of oxygen and nutrition gets to all parts of the body Abdominal breathing becomes deep or goes to normal Digestion takes place and becomes active Muscle tension and reduces The skin temperature goes up or back to normal Body produces hormones like dopamine and the endorphins (natural pain killer for pain) The brain gets clear at this moment

There are only the physical changes that will bring great emotional feelings (joy, happiness), your thought could be very positive and optimistic, your behavior become more logical and friendly to self and others. This is a great self-care and preventive medicine, ha? We either do something in daily life to profit us or sometimes not knowingly we do something that is non-profitable or not essential. We either do the things that maximize our energy or minimization of it. We have self- goals financial, health and we should have emotional goals to do things that will help us to regenerate, rejuvenate our mind and body. Getting rid of stress should be top priority if our mind is not clear we will make more mistake and clearly we get sick from a lot of stress. So, compare stress response with the relaxation response and obviously you would want to choose of relaxation response. Once again, practicing simple exercises like deep breathing, walking away when you can or walking any time you can will help you to gain control. Please remember belly laughing for no reason. This could surprise others but teach them how and why you are laughing. When you are in no dangerous physical danger let's not act like we are. Stress is not physical danger, but when it becomes chronic (repeated for a long time), it can turn to physical danger according to medical science ask your doctor, but I think these days everyone knows that. If you are being chased by a snake, bear or a tiger run as fast as you can, but if you have an argu- ment or discussion with a supervisor, co-worker and your family members know that most likely you are not in danger so relax and handle your stress wisely. You have done it. Come down, shake it off. I wrote about this, because I want you to bring it to your awareness what could happen if you react wrong and what are your benefits is you work on handling stress. I love this idea when you are stressed, just say you are excited, you could have some of the same system of stress, but your body would produce good hormone. Just try this for a while and you will benefit from it. You want to reduce you pain or get rid of it reduce you stress and increase your relaxation. Some stress is normal and keeps our attention on the task, but repeated, unreason- able ways of life can become chronic habit and will bring sickness. You have a choice here.

Practice negative capabilities of John Keats and I guarantee you that could decrease your chronic pain and possibly eliminate altogether or at least prevent your chronic pain to flare up with intensity for a longer period of time. What is your decision? Does this make sense to you? I hope this was useful. It is all about making choices and I know you will choose what is right for you and your family. I know you are fan- tastic so let’s act it to build the neurology of being pain free by thinking, feeling, behaving acting fantastically. Final notes about stress

The stress affects all aspects of life it takes the whole network out and it is like a domino effect.

Stress effects: The function of brain, The negative emotion will prevent the use of cog- nitive faculty and logical thinking. Under stress, a person can be con- fused, not clear (lack of oxygen and nutrition), headache, migraine and so on.

A person under stress could be super sensitive and under negative emotions would have even stronger negative outcome. For example, if you are stressed and drive and someone by mistake cuts you off, you will get angry quickly with higher intensity of anger that could end up in road range and cause more hurt, but if you are relaxed while driving you could rationalize that we all you have made mistakes unintention- ally and they did not mean to harm themselves or you. When Stanley Schachter (the noted social psychologist ) and Jerome Singer (Jerome Everett Singer was the founding chair of the Medical and Clinical Psy- chology Department at Uniformed Services University ) injected adrenals into subjects who were exposed to different social situation. The ones with anger (emotional brain) were angrier and the ones with homeostasis relaxed one (using logical brain) stayed in home states (my take said in as simple as I could explain). The brain structure and neurology changes and we form the easy habit of getting stressed out easily.

Your physiology changes, think about when you are stressed, you get tensed, rigid and your muscle- skeletal movement gets less fluid.

Your endocrinology (hormone secretion) changes. Please realize that you produce adrenal and cortisol (we need limited amount for focus, attention and motivation), but chronic stress hormones not only becomes harmful, but we do not also produce the good hormone that is the second harm.

Our body's electrochemical interaction declines and our energy goes down.when we are stressed our metabolism is affected due to fight or flight response and absorption of nutrition and minerals become ineffective. Lack of nutrition and minerals cause deficiency and functions of cells, tissues, muscles and organs become weak and or the cells ul- timately die sooner and it causes dis-ease in our body when we become tense repeatedly due to chronic stress. Our health depends on absorption of nutrients and vitamins. The alkaline and acidity of our bloods should be between 7.35 and 7.45 and by being chronically stressed this balance changes and we get allergies, cold and other diseases due to weak immune system since cortisol and adrenal slows down or stop communication of cells and then immune system can not stop bacterias from taking over. This is when we know, we have a choice to decide not to get stressed repeatedly, because the conse- quence is sickness, pain and waist of precious time. Just keep it in mind anytime you repeat same patterns and get stressed you are changing electrochemical functions of neurons, you are cause yourself a big damage. It is like static electricity in radio of your car when you are driving by a high electric pole that will cause you not to hear your favorite music.

“The greatest weapon against stress is, our ability to choose one thought over another.” William James You behavior changes. When we are stressed we act on negative feelings (if not controlled), we do not talk much or for some people talk a lot. Some of us eat more, start smoking more (smokers) or drink alcohol to numb ourselves and feel better (stress can be trigger for all bad behavior). We start hurting our loved ones (for some people). Start problems, arguments or fights for some people and so on. We waste a lot of time and energy that could be used to our benefit for our health, relationship or financial gain. If you have a very important financial meeting and if you are not relaxed and are stressed you can lose the whole deal. Yes, it can easily happen.

How about sleep , can you sleep conformably without sleeping pills and rejuvenate the body to be more useful the next day? You lay down in bed and your body is ready to go to sleep, but this 3 to 5 pound brain is stressed and does not let you do it yet. Eventually, you will sleep, but you could waste a lot of time because you were stressed.

Digestion, wow you either will go to bathroom a lot or you can not go without going into details. It is like you will eat a lot or you won't eat much. After we come down and relax, now we feel ashamed, guilty, apologetic and spend a lot of time to fix what we did due to stress.

So now, it is worth to put our well-being and time management in health, relationship, finance, by simply learning to relax (mentally and physically).

“Do the first thing first, and the second thing not at all.” Peter Drucker, father of new business management. I am sure he meant in all areas of life, self-care or self-development, health, relationship, career, finance and your spatiality of what you believe. He also said if you work on one aspect of strengthening your life, the weakness will resolve itself and I do really believe it will. Learn and practice to do everything and all with mental and physical relaxation. The pain could take care of itself or at least would not be increased or intensified.

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” - Poet Rumi about 800 years ago - A father was telling his son, “Be careful where you walk.” The son said “Dad, you be careful where you walk. I follow your footsteps.”

- When we hate ourselves, we hate others and when we love ourselves we love others.

- If we move our own problem, the world's problem become one less and then we can help others.

- Are you going to have a relaxed mind and body so that you reduce your issues, challenges and then become a model for the world? Helpful ideas

I have helped my open minded clients with hypnotherapy. This is one of the many methods that I use to help them over years. It is content free and I do not ask for any detail of their life and when they start giving me details, I tell them that detail is not necessary. Actually, talking about causes of stress or anxiety could bring more sadness and cause more stress and pain. We only work on learning from past experiences and make sure that we do not repeat past traumas or whatever caused us stress or anxiety. You could follow the same steps and I hope it can help you to reduce or terminate your pain.

Please, bring to awareness all the stress, anxieties and happiness levels on all areas of life, so that you know what you could do to remove them for your wellbeing. I ask my clients to tell me about their stresses with honesty to see: A. How much stress they have. B. Then, we talk about how they can eliminate or reduce their stress that could help with pain reduction or pain elimination.

We make a list of stress levels in all areas of life and find out their happiness in all areas of life. Then, we can determine if their stress levels are more than their happiness levels (honestly, my experiences are that I have never seen a person that his/her happiness was high and did not have stress would have pain, but sometime people do not admit their stress level either consciously or unconsciously since it is not an easy admission). They answer the questions below and many times their pain is reduced. What I am doing here for the session, I ask them if they are angry at someone and if this anger is helping them in life and they all say no, then I ask them to forgive (not to forget) and not to carry this heavy load of stress or anxiety with them on their shoulders and they all agree because it makes sense. I repeat that if your happiness is greater than your stress level than that could ease your pain, but if you have higher stress than happiness that could contribute to your pain and you need to work to release stress on those areas of life. More stress could cause more of chronic pain and more happiness (relaxed and balanced mind) could contribute to your pain management or pain relief (please talk with your doctor, psychologist or your psychiatrist to confirm).

You could measure each entry form one to ten . One being least, five being average and ten being the highest level. 1—2—3—4—5—6—7—8—9–10 You need to find solution on stress levels above five and happiness level below 5. Improvement in either low level happiness or decreased high level stress could help you with your pain management or pain relief.

These are the questions and you need to find you happiness and stress level for each question from zero to ten. 1. Tell me your own thoughts about yourself (from childhood to now), you could break this down to childhood, teens, adulthood and present self. 2. Happiness and stress of your income (no amount needs to be mentioned) 3. Family, friend and relationship (griefs) 4. Is there anyone in your family or friends who have problems and their problems are causing you stress (sometime other people's challenges become our own). 5. Your overall health past and present (beside the pain). 6. Please write them down and go over them and the more you write the more you would be aware and more solutions will come to you. 7. Hypnotherapy has no side effect and can help with pain management. My clients have successfully been able to let go of their past suppressed negative emotions which may have caused them unnecessary pain. Everybody knows you can decide for yourself. I am passionate about helping you live a healthy happy life. Final- ly, I wish you the best care so that you can return to your idea life and your family, society and be pain free.

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Davoud is retired civilian from Los Angels Police Department. He has a B.A. in Auto-mechanics and M.S. in Industrial Management, and pursuing his Doctorate Degree in Educational Psychology, as well as ESL teaching credentials from UCLA and has been teaching for more than twenty years. He currently resides in Irvine, California with his wife, Showleh Tolbert and their dog Nala.

Davoud and his wife are passionate about making a difference which led them to become Board Certified Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Time Line Therapy® Master Coach and Trainers as well as a Hypnotherapist and instructor of Hypnotherapy in their retired days.

Davoud has successfully coached many clients to let go of their past traumas and past inappropriate and unwarranted negative emotions in as short as ten to fifteen hours using the latest scientific based tech- nologies. His joy is to see his clients free of past pains and living a productive life. You are welcomed to see some of his client's testimonials at www.NLPSuccessCoaches.com and/or his YouTube channel under his name. Davoud specializes in Chronic Pain Management and Vision Im- provement, Performance Enhancement coaching his clients to achieve their results in the shortest amount of time.

Davoud and his wife co-founded their company called Success Coach, LLC, where the couples coach their clients to more success in life. Davoud's wife also trains and certifies students locally and interna- tionally in NLP, Time Line Therapy®, Hypnotherapy and NLP Coach- ing through accredited boards of ABNLP, ABH, Time Line Therapy® Association and ABNLP Coaching Division. Their international training institute and coaching company is located in California.

Davoud is not a medical doctor and by no means does he suggest or say that you should not use conventional medicine or prescribed medicine to help you let go of your pain. His goal through his research is to show you that you may have additional options for your chronic pain and to help you be more informed. His hope and goal is that a person with chronic pain will know the other possibilities and use all means to help themselves to limit and/or eliminate their pain and live a pain free life. We know knowledge is power and not knowing can cause more damage for a longer time. If you need help, he is at your service and wishes you to be pain free.

Please, let me him know of your success so he can celebrate it with you and please do comment (all comments are welcomed) so that he can improve and grow. Knowledge quotes

“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think” ― Socrates

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” ― Albert Einstein

“Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.” ― Albert Einstein

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.” ― John Locke “It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.” ― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and listen to the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.” ― Neil deGrasse Tyson Pain quotes

Through love, all pain will turn to medicine. Don't get lost in your pain, know that one day your pain will become your cure. These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them. Every love outside of HIS love, is pain. The cure for pain is in the pain. Poet Rumi 800 years ago

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” ― Poet, John Keats

“There is a saying in Tibetan, Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength. No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that's our real disaster.” ― Dalai Lama

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Turn your wounds into wisdom.” ― Oprah Winfrey

“Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.” ― Lance Armstrong Sally Jenkins, Every Second Counts

“One word Frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.” ― Sophocles “If your hate could be turned into electricity, it would light up the whole world.” ― Nikola Tesla

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I thank you for being open minded and taking your valuable time to read this book. I hope it was a value to you or maybe it helped you to reduce or relief you pain. If it was value to you, Please help me to spread the good word, the are many people with pain, would you help someone to ease their pain, sleep better and have better quality of life so that they can be more productive and effective enjoying their life with family and friend. Please again and again always consult with your physician. This book only is source of information and not a suggestion what you should do. You and you doctor or doctors can decide what to do.

Lastly, Please send me your review and I will choose some of them to put in my book since it is impossible to include all of them because of volume limitation, but any criticism is welcome and I will put some of them in also, because it will help me grow and let the readers know what I lack or did wrong. My intention were to give information that you could use and put in practice to reduce or eliminate your pain. May you be Pain free.

I hope that you have found this book helpful, that you now have a better understanding of chronic pain and most importantly that you have learned one important fact that you can put to use in your day-to-day life.

If you have good moods, less stress and you are relaxed, you will reduce your intensity and duration of the your pain. If you have any question about this or you want to give us feedback please feel free to send me an email at [email protected] You can find us in our website when you are ready for us to serve you at: www.nlpsuccesscoaches.com I thank you for your time to read this book and wish you freedom from your pain for good.

With love,

Davoud Derogar