Practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine approach pain relief from a wider and more holistic perspective than typical medical approaches. Research is now showing that this more holistic approach helps not only reduce your pain but has additional benefits to your health…
In 2010, researchers from the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle, Washington interviewed 327 people who had participated in five clinical trials of six different complementary and alternative therapies for the treatment of back pain. These five studies found that these alternative therapies were helpful in reducing back pain. The interview sought to clarify if there were any other effects of the treatments in addition to relief of back pain and published the results in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.
Pain is a sign that you need to look at your overall health
The commonly found benefits in addition to back pain relief they found were:
– Increased options and hope
– Increased ability to relax
– Positive changes in emotional states
– Increased body awareness
– Changes in thinking that increased the ability to cope with back pain
– Increased sense of wellbeing
– Improvement in physical conditions unrelated to back pain
– Increased energy
– Increased patient activation
– Dramatic improvements in health and wellbeing
Some of these effects were considered to be life transforming.
But how can people who treat pain through alternate therapies get all these additional health benefits when these changes do not appear in those people who medicate their pain?
The answer lies into how you interpret pain.
You may think that pain is an indication of some local damage or strain and then focus your attention on the site of pain. You then get treatment on the injured area or take some medication to decrease the pain.
But treating pain this way has its flaws. Firstly you are assuming that the site of the pain is also the cause of the pain (which I have found to be rarely the case). Secondly, you are treating pain as something that you need to stop.
The way complementary and alternative medicine practitioners view pain is different…
They view pain as feedback from the body from a wider perspective. They seek to treat the person rather than treating the pain. They ask questions like ” What is inhibiting your body from self-healing so you don’t have that pain?”
As a result, treatment is directed to the whole body, mind and lifestyle issues as opposed to the medical approach of treating the isolated painful body parts.
And since this whole body, mind and lifestyle approach was effective in reducing pain and also improving other aspects of your health it may prompt you to rethink how you interpret and treat pain.
What if your pain was more than an indication of the site of a local strain or sprain?
These results suggest that pain could be more accurately described as your body’s wake-up call to improve your overall health and wellbeing. Rather than exploring ways to treat or medicate your pain a more successful approach is to be using your pain to look at what is amiss with your overall health and lifestyle.
Address these particular health and lifestyle issues (which can inhibit your body self-healing) and you will start to remedy the underlying causes of your pain and heal your overall life at the same time…. The healthy side effect of viewing your pain from a different perspective!