COVID-19 and Chronic Pain: Challenges and Opportunities
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact the world with deaths in the hundreds of thousands and countless more having become ill. To reduce the risk of contagion and death, areas around the world maintain self-quarantining practices and have been doing so now for multiple months.
Sheltering-in-place, or self- quarantining, presents both challenges and opportunities for everyone, including those with persistent, or chronic, pain.
Adopting an Attitude that You're Healthy despite having Chronic Pain: Coping with Pain Series
Chronic pain rehabilitation programs are a traditional and effective treatment for chronic pain. Such programs are based on cognitive-behavioral principles that aim to change how you experience pain. By doing so, chronic pain rehabilitation programs help you to a) reduce pain and b) return to meaningful life activities even though some level of pain may persist. In other words, by participating in chronic pain rehabilitation, you change your relationship to chronic pain. You no longer perceive pain as an alarming and disabling condition, but develop the know-how to understand your pain as a benign condition that no longer needs to disrupt or prevent your daily life activities.
Wouldn’t it be good to become so competent at dealing with persistent pain that you no longer are disabled by it?
How to Get Better When Pain is Chronic
In the last post, we began to introduce a broad definition of coping, as one’s subjective experience, or reaction, to a problem. In this post, let’s expand on this definition and explain how coming to cope better with a problem is a process of coming to experience the problem in a different and better way.
The Biopsychosocial Nature of Pain
Contexts matter. The same joke might go over in very different ways, depending on whether it’s told by a comedian in front of an audience at a comedy club or told by an applicant in the middle of a job interview. An action done over and over again might be considered in one context an admirable example of perseverance in the face of adversity, whereas in another context it might be considered an exercise in futility.
What is your relationship to chronic pain?
What is your relationship to your chronic pain? At first thought, it seems like an odd question. But, if we stop to reflect on it, couldn’t we have a relationship to pain? Don’t you already have one?
Chronic Pain and Insomnia
Insomnia is common among people with chronic pain. It's also problematic. It typically makes your pain worse and saps your abilities to cope. Understanding and overcoming insomnia is therefore important to successfully self-manage chronic pain.
Memory Problems and Chronic Pain
Half jokingly, patients with chronic pain can sometimes start to wonder whether they are coming down with Alzheimer’s. They don’t seem to remember anything anymore. Besides memory problems, it can be hard to concentrate, multi-task, and find the right word to use – that experience when the word you want to use is “on the tip of your tongue.” People with fibromyalgia have even given these problems a nickname – “fibro fog” – as in when your head is in the clouds.
Coping with Pain: How People Who Cope Really Well Do It
If you wanted to learn how to knit well, you might take a class at your community craft store. You might also get a how-to book out of the library or watch a few YouTube videos. But as you did all these things, you would also pay attention to those who already knit well and watch how they do it. You would then try to do what they do.
Your Doctor Says That You Have Chronic Pain: What Does That Mean?
Your injury was many months ago. You initially saw your primary care provider who sent you to a pain clinic. The provider at the pain clinic who evaluated you may have been a surgeon who told you to come back after you have gone to the interventional pain provider and physical therapist. You subsequently underwent evaluations and started care with each of these providers. You had this procedure and that procedure. You went to physical therapy. You did it all in the hopes that they would find the source of the pain and fix it. None of it really worked, though.