Chronic and acute pain has become one of our country’s most costly ailments, both in terms of money and emotional suffering. Acute pain refers to any pain from an immediate trauma or condition and usually acts as a warming system to the body, telling a person something is wrong. In contrast, chronic pain refers to any continual pain problem that does not serve a clear purpose. According to Morris (1992), chronic pain is pain that does not disappear or that reappears over extended periods. It persists even when the site has healed or has been surgically removed. This leads Morris to believe that "the human brain is able to produce pain in the absence of tissue damage and that pain comes into existence only at the moment when it arrives in our consciousness. Therefore, tapping into our emotions, imagination and creativity can have an affect on healing body and mind." In short, integrative modalities can help significantly reduce pain symptoms.

Everyone perceives pain differently. These perceptions can be influenced by many factors including emotional and mental attitudes, previous experiences with pain and what memory we associate with pain. The cause of the pain also influences our reaction to it and consequently factors into our perception of that pain. For example, an exercise-induced ache will elicit a different reaction that the pain caused by a cancerous tumor. This feature reviews three ways to treat pain, be it acute or chronic.

Imagery

Imagery is the internal experiences of memories, dreams, fantasies, and visions. Imagery may involve one or more of the senses and serves as a bridge for connecting a person’s body, mind, spirit and feelings.

Everyone has images; they evolved in humans long before language did. Images are thoughts that draw on the senses. They may involve one, several, or all of the following senses: sight, touch, sound, taste, smell, kinesthesia (movement) and inner sensation or felt sense.

Worry is a classic example of the psychophysiologic power of imagery. When you worry and focus on thoughts of danger or disaster that may or may not come to pass your body becomes tense and aroused, anticipating a threat or challenge. The fight or flight response is activated initiating a chain of physiologic changes that ready you for intense physical activity. If you worry habitually your body is always responding to threats that never materialize or never go away. You do not release the pent up energy or take the opportunity to relax and your system can not rebuild its depleted reserves. Hence you become exhausted, "stressed out" or "burned out."

The only threats have been thoughts themselves, though your responses and the physiologic toll they have been taking have been quite real.

1. It allows your body to use its energies for repair and restoration. It provides respite from habitual patterns of tension.
2. Learning to relax helps you build confidence in your ability to control your body.
3. It increases your awareness of what kinds of things, people, and thoughts tend to make you tense.
4. It interrupts habitual negative thought patterns. Clearing your mind and opening it up to new ideas.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation was coined by Edmund Jacobsen in the 1930’s. Jacobsen discovered that patients hooked to a machine measuring nerve signals who imagined walking or chewing actually had electrical signals in the muscle groups involved in the activity. He was the first to use imagination to focus on various parts of the body to produce relaxation. It is a skill that improves with practice, much like the way practicing a sport or instrument is necessary.

Once we have practiced relaxing then we can start to go deeper by creating images specifically aimed at relieving your symptoms or stimulating your healing process.

Remember it is a two-way path of communication between your silent unconscious mind and your verbal conscious mind.

Active imagery communicates conscious intentions to your unconscious mind. It consists of imagining your desired goal as if it is already achieved while maintaining a passive relaxed state of mind.

Jeanne Archterberg and Frank Lawlis at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center studied imagery with cancer patients. Their findings indicated that the more powerful and active the imagery of a healthy immune system function the better the outcome for the patient. Anatomical accuracy did not seem to be a factor in effectiveness and in fact, symbolic representation of healing activity often seems more effective. There have been other studies that support anatomic and physiologic details if it is a pre-selected imagery scenario rather than one the patient creates.

Besides physiological relaxation, imagery can aid in pain reduction and relief, empower the patient, stimulate healing responses, enhance compliance, tolerate difficult procedures, deepen patient rapport and address emotional needs of patient.

Archterber, J. (1985). Imagery in healing: Shamanism and modern medicine. Boston: New Science Library/Shambala.

In addition, the effects that specific colors have on the body are well documented. For example, red stimulates the sympathetic nervous or fight system, while white, green and blue stimulate the parasympathetic nervous or relaxation response system. The degree of relaxation induced by the colors blue, green and white is responsible for changing our intensity of pain. Simply sitting in a room illuminated in a blue light can help ease pain considerably.

Rhythm entrainment describes the phenomenon where, in the presence of an external rhythmic stimulus, the natural rhythm of the heartbeat will be overridden and will instead pulse in sync with the sound source. Examples of rhythm entrainment include drums and a machine motor.

Resonance, on the other hand, refers to different sound frequencies stimulating the body to vibrate in different areas. "The human body has its own rhythmic patterns and there is growing evidence that the rhythms of the heart, brain and other organs enjoy a special synchronicity. Illness can arise when these inner rhythms are disturbed." (Campbell 1992)