It took me over six years to figure out the exact cause of these symptoms and find the right treatment, but thankfully I was able to do so.
There is a lot of science showing the connections between chronic pain and mental health disorders. During my fight, many doctors told me: What they failed to communicate to me was what I could do about it. The information they shared often annoyed me more than helped me. It’s like an oasis in the desert that turns out to be nothing more than a mirage, and any attempt to make your way towards it always drifts away.
It turned out that I had physical and mental problems. I had major knee surgery when I was 16 and never had proper rehab. I have loved her one leg over the other for over 30 years.i had a genetic defect bumped hipsIt limits your flexibility. These combined to cause back pain, hip pain, knee pain, and more. And I had an unresolved childhood trauma that caused anxiety.
All these bodily pains have come and gone in almost every part of my adult life, but it wasn’t until 2014, when I was 49, that my hips started to completely debilitate. That’s when I started feeling unwell. I briefly had depression when she was 25. In 2005, I had a similar brief period of anxiety, but in 2013 the anxiety recurred and did not go away. Due to the stigma surrounding mental health, I tried my best to hide my mental health issues while always being open about the pain caused by my physical problems.
what didn’t solve my pain
Too often, when I sought help, doctors suggested that my anxiety could be the cause of my pain without explaining what to do about it. It is not helpful for the patient to hear about a construction worker who thought he had a nail stuck in his leg, only to find that the nail had gone between his toes and completely dislodged him. The point, of course, is that pain can be experienced without an actual physical cause. That’s certainly fascinating, but how would that help? For someone like me, hearing headaches was a problem on many levels. Yes, some people benefit from this realization, but many do not.
I have experienced suffering from some kind of chronic pain, mostly back pain, and simply realize that it comes from some mental problem, usually some form of stress or anxiety, and that it Some people have told me how they disappeared. I had multiple psychiatrists suggest this. Just exercise and know that nothing is wrong physically.
Chronic pain patients presented with this option desperately want it to be true, but their fixation on quick and easy solutions can be a major obstacle to improvement.
There is also a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to say that mental health problems cause physical suffering. This means that for most people pain is practically non-existent. The pain will not go away as it is. The pain caused by mental problems is real. Only the chain of causality is different.
Look for listeners, not magicians
In fact, there are many patients who have both mental and physical problems. The two may influence each other, but the patient faces the stress that he cannot choose one treatment.
Additionally, there is sheer complexity of what we know and what we don’t yet know about how mental health issues affect physical pain. And the unfortunate reality is that doctors tend to be very bad at both navigating such complexities and explaining things to their patients. These challenges hit me in the face again and again while battling anxiety and chronic pain.
If you have chronic pain or mental health issues, we recommend the following approach.
Seek help from a medical or mental health professional first. Don’t go looking for someone who has the magic answer. Find someone who will listen to you and communicate in a way that you can understand.
Next, you need to get as much understanding as possible about whether your problem is physical, mental, or both. Most of the time trial and error will be required here. The answer is not always obvious. I’m still not quite sure how much my anxiety affected my physical pain. I know I have serious physical problems and that was the main cause of my pain. Finding a muscle activation therapist to help me get muscles that I had misused for years to work properly, the process took almost a year, but my pain decreased dramatically. I was.
Third, if you suspect a mental health component, don’t assume it’s easy to get around. You need to understand the sources of your anxiety and depression, deal with them honestly, and train your mind to better handle the sources of stress in the future. This relieves pain from this cause in the same way healing bones relieve pain in a broken arm.
I visited about a dozen psychiatrists/psychologists until I found one who guided me through three and a half years of psychotherapy that helped me deal with my unresolved trauma and relieve my anxiety. . I think this, too, has at least a little to do with my physical pain relief.
This is all very complicated, but trust me there is one important thing. That said, help exists and you can get better. There are ways to reduce chronic pain, anxiety, and depression.
Adam Smith is a Democrat representing the United States House of Representatives, Washington State’s 9th congressional district. his new book isLost and Broken: My Journey to Recover from Chronic Pain and Devastating Anxiety”
