| |
 |
|
ISBN: 0-7570-0079-7
Length: 296 Pages
Size: 7.5
X 9-inch
Format: Quality Paperback
Category: Health / Pain Management
Price: $18.95
US / $28.50 CAN
Availability:
In Print
Click below for:
Synopsis • Contents
Introduction • Reviews |
Synopsis
For millions of Americans, severe pain is
a fact of everyday life. Standard medicine commonly offers relief
through drug therapies. While often effective, these medications
come with a host of side effects, from drowsiness to addiction.
While many sufferers would prefer nondrug options, much of the available
information on alternative pain treatment is scattered, incomplete,
and in many instances, out of date--or it was, until now. Professional
health writers Dr. Sylvia Goldfarb and Roberta Waddell have designed
Relieving Pain Naturally to be a comprehensive guide
to drug-free pain management.
Part One examines over forty of the most common
chronic pain-related conditions, from abdominal pain to tendonitis.
Each disorder is explained, and its alternative pain treatments
detailed. Part Two offers twenty-seven drug-free therapies, including
both conventional treatments and alternative modalities, such as
acupuncture, biofeedback, heat and cold therapy, hypnosis, nutrition,
and oxygen therapy. A comprehensive resource section guides you
to professional organizations that can help you find an appropriate
therapist in your area.
For years, millions of pain sufferers have longed
for a safe, side effect-free treatment for chronic pain. Now, Relieving
Pain Naturally provides a reliable starting point.
Sylvia
Goldfarb, PhD, a writer specializing in medical topics,
has written articles for numerous magazines, including Focus,
Natural Body and Fitness, and Today’s O.R. Nurse. She
is also the author of two books, including Allergy Relief.
Roberta
W. Waddell has been both a writer and editor in the field
of alternative health for over sixteen years. Because of her own
chronic pain, she has experienced conventional and alternative therapies
firsthand.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Quick Help Chart
Part 1--Conditions
Achilles Tendonitis
Angina
Back Pain
Bursitis
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
Cluster Headaches
Crohn’s Disease
Dental Pain
Diverticulitis
Endometriosis
Fibromyalgia
Frozen Shoulder
Gout
Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)
Migraine Headaches
Neuroma
Osteoarthritis
Pelvic Floor Tension
Myalgia
Peripheral Neuropathy
Phantom Pain
Plantar Fasciitis
Postherpetic Neuralgia
Post-Polio Syndrome
Premenstrual Syndrome
Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome (RSDS)
Rheumatoid Arthritis
Rotator Cuff Tendonitis
Sciatica
Spinal Stenosis
Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome
Temporomandibular Joint (TMJ) Pain
Tennis Elbow
Tension Headaches
Thoracic Outlet Syndrome
Trigeminal Neuralgia
Trigger Finger
Ulcerative Colitis
Part 2--Treatments
Acupuncture and Acupressure
Applied Kinesiology
Aromatherapy
Bee Venom Therapy
Biofeedback
Chiropractic
Compresses, Packs, and Poultices
Craniosacral Therapy
Cupping
Exercise, Stretching, and Sports
Guided Imagery and Visualization
Heat Therapy/Cold Therapy
Herbal Remedies
Homeopathy
Hydrotherapy
Hypnosis
Magnet Therapy
Massage
Meditation
Nutritional Therapy
Osteopathic Manipulation
Oxygen Therapies
Physical Therapy
Reflexology
Rolfing
Supplement Therapy
Tai Chi, Qigong, and Yoga
Resources--Listed by Condition and Treatment
General Resources References--Listed by Condition and Treatment
General References
About the Authors
Index
Introduction
Pain is always unpleasant, but under certain circumstances it may be necessary. Yes, sometimes it is necessary--for instance, if you pick up something hot, the pain signals you to drop it before you do serious damage to your skin. This type of pain is called acute pain and is a natural response, a signal to your body that it has been injured or that something else is wrong.
Severe chest pain can warn you of an impending heart attack and can save your life by having you seek prompt medical attention. Acute pain can also result from injuries, burns, fractures, wounds, surgery, disease, or dental procedures. It can last for hours, days, or weeks and usually responds to medication, such as narcotics and/or analgesics (painkillers), which are useful in the short-term. In essence, these medications cover up symptoms and help you get over a crisis.
On the other hand, chronic pain can be constant or recurrent and can last for months, or even years. It becomes an unwelcome, twenty-four-hour-a-day companion. If you suffer from chronic pain, you should be aware that narcotics can be addictive, and anti-inflammatory drugs can cause problems if you use them for long periods. Ibuprofen, for example, can cause stomach ulcers, or other forms of internal bleeding, and kidney problems. Too much aspirin can also cause some bleeding problems and can lead to ringing in the ears, even hearing loss, sweating, visual problems, and rapid heartbeat. Acetaminophen is gentler on your stomach, but excessive use can cause liver damage, especially to those who use alcohol on a regular basis.
Do you suffer from chronic pain and want to do something about it other than popping pills or just resting and applying heat or ice? Have you attempted to seek help outside mainstream medicine? Maybe you are so familiar with the early symptoms signaling the approach of your pain problem that you can often tell in advance when an attack is imminent. For example, you might be able to forecast when a migraine is about to descend on you. Do you have an arsenal ready to combat it? You probably do know ways to diminish its effect, but maybe you’ve also tried to research additional, alternative methods to relieve your pain and found yourself overwhelmed by the variety of information available. Those of you who are computer savvy and explore the Internet will find over a million web sites dealing with alternative approaches to pain control. If you browse in a book store or library, you will notice that most pain books focus on a particular condition or a singular method of pain control, for example, magnet therapy, or a particular visualization technique.
Most practitioners only have expertise in their particular treatment so you might have to consult several until you find the one or two just right for your problem. This book, on the other hand, will give you conveniently accessible answers to your questions in one place, under one cover.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
The format we have chosen is intended to give you quick and easy access to the information you are seeking about alternative (and some conventional) methods that can be useful to relieve your pain. At the beginning of this two-part book, we have a Quick Help Chart, which is an alphabetical overview of both general pain conditions and specific conditions discussed in the book. It is accompanied by a summary of the best treatments for each condition. Within these summaries you will find the names of some treatments in boldface. While all the treatments mentioned can be effective, the boldfaced treatments may be most effective.
Part 1 of the book has an entry for each of the individual conditions. In every entry, we summarize the problem, give its symptoms and causes, and discuss diagnoses--in keeping with the idea that a correct diagnosis of the problem is crucial to any pain treatment, we present several methods for pinpointing the root of the pain, including applied kinesiology (which also goes on to treat the diagnosed pain). We list conventional treatments for the condition, and the problems with some of these conventional treatments, then progress to a discussion of the appropriate alternative natural treatments for the condition, quoting doctors throughout. We give details on precisely what remedies to use, in what form, how often, and for how long, breaking them down by age, weight, and sex wherever appropriate. In the section on alternative natural treatments, we divide the therapies into those you can do yourself at home and those that require a healthcare professional or an advanced knowledge of the method. For additional information on suggested treatments, we refer you to the specific treatment entry that applies.
Part 2 of the book has entries on individual treatments, also listed from A to Z. We summarize each treatment method, and give its history and its advantages. We list what conditions respond well to the particular method, explain how to use or make it, and give whatever warnings or contraindications are applicable. In both parts of the book, we illustrate these topics with case histories.
To help you learn more about all the conditions and treatments, there are resources and references in the back of the book. They are listed by entry and include organizations, web sites, and references specific to that particular entry’s condition or treatment. An additional section on general resources for umbrella groups contains listings for pain-related alternative/holistic organizations, web sites with information on treatments, and referrals to practitioners. Each treatment entry has an additional section on successful clinical studies for that modality, and any unfamiliar treatments or arcane terms are defined as they come up. To round this out, there is a comprehensive index allowing you instant access to the condition or treatment you are researching.
It is important to emphasize here that this book is intended for people who want to take an active role in their own health and not just leave the decision to others. It promotes alternative approaches over the use of painkillers and invasive methods (we include only two moderately invasive therapies, acupuncture and bee venom therapy, which the Chinese believe is the original root of acupuncture) because we believe that, in many cases, these methods can more effectively get to and treat the core of the problem, and can lead to long-lasting relief. It is interesting to note that, before they became part of the standard orthodox treatment lexicon, many methods were first called alternative, as for example, Sister Kenny’s hot packs and physical therapy for polio instead of the bulky braces that had been standard treatment. Her methods replaced braces and became the mainstream treatment for polio.
Painkiller medicines, as we said, basically give relief by masking symptoms which invariably return when the effects of the medication wear off, in turn requiring the use of more painkillers, and leading, in a downward spiral, to the painkiller-addiction trap that many people fall into unawares when it’s too late and they are confronted with another huge problem in addition to their original pain. We feel this vicious cycle can best be avoided by the use of alternative methods.
Additionally, in connection with conventional methods, be aware that researchers are working overtime to develop new drugs and new invasive procedures for pain eradication. That magical pill or new surgical procedure to banish pain forever is always just around the corner. The trouble is, however, there are no magic bullets, and as has too often happened in the past, that miracle drug or medical procedure can easily end up having unwanted, even disastrous side effects. For this reason, among others, caution is strongly advised when considering new drugs or treatments that are untested by time.
The Costs of Chronic Pain
According to the National Chronic Pain Outreach Association (NCPOA), chronic pain affects one in ten Americans, and disables more people than cancer or heart disease. It costs the economy over $90 billion a year in medical costs, disability payments, and lost productivity, and yet it has received little attention from researchers until recently, and is consistently underfunded. It is also interesting to note that painkillers account for the largest percentage of prescribed medications in the United States.
THE NATURE OF PAIN
Before delving into the solutions we have detailed for you in the following pages, we feel it would be helpful to briefly discuss the nature of chronic and acute pain, a complex interaction of mind and body--even, according to some, a subjective experience. The old idea was that the intensity of the pain was directly related to the intensity of the injury. Still the theory for acute pain, and still taught in many medical schools, it is responsible for allopathic medicine’s reliance on the idea that surgery or medicines can deal with the pain’s origin and make it disappear. It doesn’t take into account the pain that drags on, or the pain that is less visible yet still intense, the kind of pain that doesn’t go away, even with medical intervention.
Pain pathways are very complex and can be rapid or slow. A pain signal can continue after an injury has supposedly healed, or even when an appendage has been amputated--a phenomenon known as phantom pain. Pain can get transmitted to the brain as something other than pain, or the brain can transmit a no-pain message back to the injured area. No matter what the injury, however, there is always continuous pain-to-brain-to-pain feedback.
Surgery can cut off the source of the pain, or drugs can numb it, but the pain can still manage to come back anyway, often initiating the aforementioned downward spiral of larger and larger doses of painkillers as the body develops more and more tolerance for them. The best alternative to this is to alter the attitude toward the pain--change how the body feels by changing how the brain reacts to the pain. And for this, it is important to know something about the physiology of pain.
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF PAIN
Pain begins in pain receptors, those nerve ends that lie along the body’s periphery. Pain receptors react to a pain-causing occurrence--a cut, a burn, a scrape, or a blow, as from a fall, etc.--and immediately send the pain message through the body to the spinal cord where it continues on up to the brain.
As we said, there are basically two kinds of pain, acute and chronic. Both travel a similar ascending pathway, though at different rates of speed depending on which nerve fibers transmit the message, until they reach the brain, at which point they take separate routes.
Fast pain, the kind that feels like painful pressure and touch, is transmitted along large diameter, A-beta nerve fibers. Slow pain, is transmitted along two types of nerve fibers, A-delta and C, that are smaller in diameter. A-delta pain, although slower than A-beta, is the acute pain you feel when you get burned or cut. The more secondary dull, aching, burning, cramping, chronic pain, the type we are primarily concerned with in this book, is called slow pain. It is transmitted along the smaller and slower C-fiber nerves, one of two slower nerve fibers (the other being A-delta).
Although these pain messages travel similar nerve-fiber routes up to the brain, once there they diverge. The fast pain goes to the thalamus and the cortex (where most of the thought processes take place). If your thigh hits the sharp corner of a table, for example, your peripheral pain receptors in that area relay this fast pain message to a special area of the spinal cord, which recognizes it. The message is then relayed up the cord to the brain where the cortex prompts you to say “Ouch” and begin rubbing yourself. This acts to ameliorate the painful sensation.
The reason this works is because rubbing is a fast-pain sensation that gets rapidly transmitted over the large A-beta fibers, consequently cancelling out the sharp pain from bumping your thigh, which gets more slowly transmitted by the smaller A-delta nerve fibers. The end result is that the rubbing is all you feel, not the painful bumping encounter. It is this reaction in the body that helps to explain why a therapy like acupuncture, for example, works so well in lessening pain: the sufficient amount of stimulus received in (fast pain) acupuncture acts as a gate to close out the slower pain sensations.
The theory that there are gates on the bundles of spinal cord nerve fibers that can either open to transmit pain impulses to the brain, or close to cut them off, was first propounded in 1965 by Dr. Patrick Wall and Dr. Ronald Melzack, well-known researchers and authors in the field of pain-control studies. Their theory, since modified, has stimulated much of the current thinking on the subject of pain. Although the gate control theory is not able to explain several chronic pain problems, such as phantom limb pain, which require a greater understanding of brain mechanisms, it has become the overall standard for pain theories, helping those in the field to be more effective in their treatment of chronic pain.
Chronic pain moves along the slower pathway of the smaller C-fiber nerves and goes to the hypothalmus and the limbic structures (as do the smaller, slower A-delta nerve fibers). The hypothalmus is considered the central clearing house of the brain and, when it receives pain messages, it instructs the pituitary gland to release certain stress hormones. The limbic structures are where the emotions get processed and their involvement with pain messages helps to explain why your feelings can influence your pain.
Once a pain message has been received by any of these areas, the brain tries to block the message by sending a message back to the pain along the descending pathway, telling the body not to register pain until later, or even never. Not much is known about these descending tracts outside the fact that they are largely chemical and they function to shut the above-mentioned gates in the spinal cord to the ascending pain messages. These characteristics help to explain why such methods as biofeedback, self-hypnosis, guided imagery, and other therapies that rely primarily on the brain work so well to control pain.
In the pain-to-brain-to-pain transmission, neurotransmitters are an important link, acting to either kill the pain or produce it. In pain relief, serotonin and the group called endorphins and enkaphalins are important neurotransmitters that can be as powerful as morphine or heroin. Different people produce differing amounts of these neurotransmitters, which is why some people have a higher threshold of tolerance for pain than others. The athletes we regularly read about who perform heroic feats with broken or dislocated bones, or other severe injuries, may be able to do so because of their body’s higher production of endorphins which literally override the pain-to-brain message.
We hope that knowing a little about the mechanisms of the pain process will help you to get the most out of this book. Our main purpose and focus in writing it has been to give you a comprehensive approach to dealing with your pain, preferably through alternative methods (for the reasons stated above), but also, when necessary, through safe and effective mainstream approaches as well. The information we present can help you assess your situation, learn about the many ways there are to manage your pain, and lead you to new options you may wish to try out, on your own or in conjunction with your pain control specialist.
We wish you luck in your quest for pain relief. Just remember: Even if we can’t fully control what happens to us, we can control the way we deal with what happens to us.
Reviews
"[Goldfarb
and Waddell] succeed in offering quick and easy access to information
about pain relief ... useful to people looking for new ways of
coping with their pain."
--Publishers
Weekly, December 13, 2004
BACK
TO TOP OF PAGE
|
