A Variety Of Posts About Those With Chronic Pain

It's good to remember that there's a tendency to rewrite our past and put it on a pedestal: "Those were the good old days." But, in reality, my life before I got sick was a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant experiences, good times and rough times.

More often than not, chronic illness and chronic pain go hand-in-hand, so when I use the term "chronically ill," I'm including people who are in chronic pain. My hope is that it won't be long until these common misconceptions become uncommon ones, as people become educated about what life is like for those who suffer from chronic illness (130 million in the U.S.

In my last piece, 4 Techniques to Help with Physical Pain, I described five exercises to help ease bodily pain. The response to that piece was so positive that I thought I'd follow-up by describing one of the mainstays of mindfulness-based techniques for helping with chronic pain and illness: the body scan.

In an earlier article, " How Mindfulness Can Help with Physical Suffering," I noted that bodily discomfort has three aspects to it: (1) the unpleasant physical sensation itself; (2) our emotional reaction to the discomfort, such as anger or fear; and (3) the thoughts that are triggered by the discomfort, such as, "This pain will never go away" or "I'm a weak person because I hate this pain so much."

According to the National Center for Health Statistics chronic pain health care costs and lost productivity has reached nearly $100 billion a year. It affects approximately 76.2 million people - more individuals than diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined. The primary goals in chronic pain management are to assess, understand and treat your pain condition.

Life with chronic illness is just like any other -- a life full of obstacles. It's easy to lay down and not get back up. But if you're not moving, you're not living.

I'm describing an old Wagnerian opera. In this scenario, I'm the aging, not too fat lady with the round prednisone face and the guy in the lederhosen and the suspenders with the somewhat Nazi attitude; he would be my doctor. In the stories and plays, loneliness is always described in such grandiose scale.

A patient owned nutritional supplement company dedicated to patients with Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. We sell the supplements patients and doctors recommend most, and we report on Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research and news daily and in our monthly free newsletters.

Felix Naughton and his colleagues conducted a study to examine the relationship between sleep quality, depression, pain severity, and disability. Their results (reported in the journal Pain) showed that sleep quality did not directly affect disability, but rather that poor sleep quality tended to make people feel more depressed and tended to make their pain feel worse.

Chronic pain changes everything in life, most entirely invisible to outsiders. Many people do not seem to understand chronic pain nor how extensive its effects are. They cannot see that sufferers have attempted numerous alternative therapies and know what therapies have worked or not worked for them.

WebMD Feature Archive One of the hardest things about chronic pain is that only you know how bad the pain feels. There's no blood test that can show much you're suffering. There's often no outward sign, like a bandage or a cast. There's just the pain. "Pain is always personal," says F.

Successful couples communicate and collaborate to overcome chronic pain, says psychologist Annmarie Cano. What are some of the ways chronic pain can affect couples? Some couples approach pain as a shared problem or challenge. These are the couples that make the best of the situation.