Improving One's Pain Threshold

I am 24 and deal with chronic pain every day. I have gone through pain management classes and here's a few things that I learned there...

I know it is hard, but you have to try not to think about your pain. When you constantly think about the area that hurts, it actually affects your brain, and the surrounding nerves, and it will in effect hurt more. Try meditation or deep breathing exercises. Project yourself to somewhere relaxing and think of the things you would hear, see, smell, and even feel there. I use the beach.

There are several different alternative ways to help pain, such as; acupuncture, acupressure, reflexology, yoga, etc. Check around in your area to see what is available to you.

Make sure that you exercise, and if you can't then at least do some stretching excercises every day. A firm muscle that is in shape is going to hurt a lot less than an out of shape muscle. Also you need to get up and move around just to keep your circulation healthy. Even just to walk around sometimes helps.

Maybe you should attend pain management classes, or support group meetings. It is always nice to know that you are not alone, and there are a lot of people out there who can not only relate, but also want to help.

I hope some of this helps!!!! Good luck with your surgery, I hope everything goes well for you!

About the "pumping iron" - you should check with your doctor about how much weight you should actually be lifting with that arm prior to surgery. But there are firming and stretching exercises that don't require weights; maybe you can get more info. On these on a search engine like yahoo, or google.

Pain management for me was very helpful. I went to one on one appointments with a counselor, as well as small group meetings. We discussed different methods of meditation, deep breathing, etc. And we discussed different ways of dealing with our pain, how it affects us - and the people around us, and how to live a normal life while being in pain.
We all had to keep a journal of how our pain affected us every day - how much it hurt on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the worst, if it made you crabby that day, if you wanted to cry or did cry that day, how our medication affected us, things like that. It gave me a lot of insight.

You can probably find more information on pain management groups on the internet also. I hope this helps!

Angieschimm

Hi.

Thanks so much for the info. Just out of curiousity, are you currently pain-free?

Whitestar

I had a hysterectomy 4 years ago and woke up with pain in my left ear and throat. I still have the pain today even though i'm on the duragesic pain patch and hydrocodone for breakthrough. They are telling me now they believe I have glosopharyngeal neuragia, which is where the nerve sten's covering begins to come off and the neuro doc needs to go in to put a covering on the end of the nerve. He says it's like having a live wire with having shock like , electrical pain shoot in the areaaffected. It comes and goes in cycles. But lately it's ben her more. Then they suggested having the deep brain stimutor placed in my brain like they do for parkinson's but now they do it for pain, stopping the ability to for me to feel any pain. It's ben a while but can't decide what to do. Just wanted to let you all know about the deep brain stimuator that is placed in the area of the brain where pain is controlled, and you may turn it up or down. But I think the bottom line is getting the culprit fixed. Good luck to all in pain, it's a real pain I know!
Take car-katylia