Can You Reshape Your Brain's Response To Pain? NPR article, June 10, 2019

Can You Reshape Your Brain's Response To Pain?

NPR article, June 10, 2019

A fibromyalgia patient's recovery story, and the therapy she tried was developed by Schubiner who thinks ME/CFS is a Psychophysiologic Disorder.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health.../can-you-reshape-your-brains-response-to-pain

"Repeated exposure to psychological trauma, or deep anxiety or depression — especially in childhood — can leave a physical imprint on the brain that can make some people, like Jeannine, more vulnerable to chronic pain, scientists say."

 

Not for me then. I had a happy youth. Futhermore an immune modulator eases my pain.

 

The article asserts “Repeated exposure to psychological trauma, or deep anxiety or depression — especially in childhood — can leave a physical imprint on the brain that can make some people, like Jeannine, more vulnerable to chronic pain, scientists say”.

Is there evidence that people experiencing trauma are subsequently more likely than the general population to develop idiopathic pain conditions, that is experience pain with no identified stimulus? Are people with such as fibromyalgia more likely to have experience prior trauma than the general population? Obviously childhood trauma is neither necessary or sufficient to cause such as fibromyalgia, given many people acquire the condition without prior trauma, and not everyone that experiences trauma gets fibromyalgia.

It is a potentially risky area of research, given there is a risk of circular logic: chronic pain results from previous trauma so people with chronic pain must have had a traumatic event, but if you look hard enough in anyone’s life you could find an event that years after the fact could be described as traumatic. I am not saying it is not a possible factor, rather that it is a difficult one to demonstrate.

 

I fell off a teeter totter when I was 3. This is the reason I joined S4ME.

 

Based on the people I knew in a former life, physical and psychological pain when younger is much more likely to produce the exact opposite effect.

Whatever happened to 'desensitisation'? The theory that repeated exposure to things desensitises someone to it.

The same theory they use to get rid of phobias.

The same theory the military have always used to train people to kill, as the vast majority of people aren't wired to do such things, without training to desensitise them.

Isn't this the polar opposite - they can't both be right but they seem to be being espoused by essentially the same people.

 

What upsets me about treatments like the one described in the original post is that it tends to get expanded and expanded in its application, and ends with people simply not being believed about anything at all (in a medical context).

 

I'm being pedantic but the title "Can you reshape your brain's response to pain?" doesn't make sense.
The brain doesn't respond to pain, it creates it.

 

Then where is the evidence that people who experienced serious childhood trauma have higher incidence of chronic pain? Oh, right, doesn't exist. And why is it that many people, like me, who have never had any such trauma falsify your model entirely, you hack?

Science is not a vehicle for promoting one's personal opinion. This is "water has memory of the stuff it dissolved" kind of BS. Stop it with this shit.

 

What's the conversion rate of thetans to traumas?

 

I did not even know what a teeter totter was when I was a child, this childhood deprivation is the reason I joined S4ME.

What is a teeter totter?

 

Ah, see, that's completely different because it does not support this belief system and therefore should be ignored when inconvenient.

Although... yeah, the whole point of CBT is to "desensitise" illness caused by "overexposure" of unrelated stuff, or something like that. Brilliant. Like explaining the unexplained, which is something said seriously by serious people who somehow don't take a moment to mouth those words slowly to appreciate just how ridiculous they are.

 

@Peter Trewhitt

 

Oh dear, I too fell off a seesaw (teeter totter) when I was three or four. I had forgotten all about it. Obviously the trauma caused suppressed memories.

 

Wrong thread! Surely this should be in Rhyming Couplets?

 

@Peter Trewhitt A teeter totter is the thing in the playground next to the slide, which I fell off of onto my head, and that's why I joined s4me!

 

I fell off children's play equipment aged about 5 or 6. You must have seen kids hanging off the top bar of a swing like in the picture.

I was doing this one day when I got called by my mother to come in for dinner. I let go of the bar with my hands AND my knees. In other words, I forgot to hold on. The seat of the swing below me broke my fall just enough so that I could turn over, a bit like a cat. I still landed on my head, but not with my full body weight above me, instead I was almost horizontal. I don't remember doing masses of damage, but I was very, very shocked by what I had done.

 

Well have you ever met anybody who doesn't exist who got CFS?

Coincidence?