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The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
Plus: how to get your brain in gear
The 10almonds Team
January 03, 2024
Today’s almonds have been activated by:
Want to make your food healthier and/but also more exciting? Adding spices might be the way to go. Many spices have a lot of healthful phytochemicals, so they pack a punch in more than just taste.
⏰ IN A RUSH?
Today’s 30-Second Summary
If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:
Chronic pain is, well, a pain. Today’s featured expert has decades of professional specialist medical experience helping people to manage that.
His approach can be divided into 7 parts: medications, interventions, neuroscience and stress reduction, diet and the microbiome, sleep, exercise and movement, and therapies of the mind and body
Check out today’s main feature for more on all of those!
Not everyone wants to quit alcohol. So, if you're going to drink, you might as well enjoy your drinks mindfully!
Today’s sponsor, Sunnyside, is an app that helps you change your relationship with alcohol, so that your choice is really your choice—not a mindless habit that you don’t even truly take joy in.
Read on to learn about these things and more…
👀 WATCH AND LEARN
How To Get Your Brain Into Gear (6:42)
In response to the question "I know what to do, so why don't I do it?", Karin has answers:
Brain-hacking menu:
Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖
😣 MAIN FEATURE
More Than One Way To Kill Pain
This is Dr. Deepak Ravindran (MD, FRCA. FFPMRCA, EDRA. FIPP, DMSMed). He has decades of experience and is a specialist in acute and chronic pain management, anesthesia, musculoskeletal medicine, and lifestyle medicine.
A quick catch-up, first:
We’ve written about chronic pain management before:
As well as:
Dr. Ravindran’s approach
Dr. Ravindran takes a “trauma-informed care” approach to his professional practice, and recommends the same for others.
In a nutshell, this means starting from a position of not “what’s wrong with you?”, but rather “what happened to you?”.
This seemingly subtle shift is important, because it means actually dealing with a person’s issues, instead of “take one of these and call my secretary next month”. Read more:
Pain itself can be something of a many-headed hydra. Dr. Ravindran’s approach is equally many-headed; specifically, he has a 7-point plan:
Medications
Dr. Ravindran sees painkillers (and a collection of other drugs, like antidepressants and muscle relaxants) as a potential means to an end worth exploring, but he doesn’t expect them to be the best choice for everyone, and nor does he expect them to be a cure-all. Neither should we. He also advises being mindful of the drawbacks and potential complications of these drugs, too.
Interventions
Sometimes, surgery is the right choice. Sometimes it isn’t. Often, it will change a life—one way or the other. Similar to with medications, Dr. Ravindran is very averse to a “one size fits all” approach here. See also:
Neuroscience and stress management
Often a lot of the distress of pain is not just the pain itself, but the fear associated with it. Will it get worse if I move wrong or eat the wrong thing? How long will it last? Will it ever get better? Will it get worse if I do nothing?. Dr. Ravindran advises tackling this, with the same level of importance as the pain itself. Here’s a good start:
Diet and the microbiome
Many chronic illnesses are heavily influenced by this, and Dr. Ravindran’s respect for lifestyle medicine comes into play here. While diet might not fix all our ills, it certainly can stop things from being a lot worse. Beyond the obvious “eat healthily” (Mediterranean diet being a good starting point for most people), he also advises doing elimination tests where appropriate, to screen out potential flare-up triggers. You also might consider:
Sleep
“Get good sleep” is easy advice for those who are not in agonizing pain that sometimes gets worse from staying in the same position for too long. Nevertheless, it is important, and foundational to good health. So it’s important to explore—whatever limitations one might realistically have—what can be done to improve it.
If you can only sleep for a short while at a time, you may get benefit from this previous main feature of ours:
Exercise and movement
The trick here is to move little and often; without overdoing it, but without permitting loss of mobility either. See also:
Therapies of the mind and body
This is about taking a holistic approach to one’s wellness. In Dr. Ravindran’s words:
❝Mind-body therapies are often an extremely sensitive topic about which people hold very strong opinions and sometimes irrational beliefs.
Some, like reiki and spiritual therapy and homeopathy, have hardly any scientific evidence to back them up, while others like yoga, hypnosis, and meditation/mindfulness are mainstream techniques with many studies showing the benefits, but they all work for certain patients.❞
In other words: evidence-based is surely the best starting point, but if you feel inclined to try something else and it works for you, then it works for you. And that’s a win.
Want to know more?
You might like his book…
Take care!
❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE
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🌍 AROUND THE WEB
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More to come tomorrow!
📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW
Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It – by Dr. Ethan Kross
This book is about much more than just one's internal monologue. It does tackle that, but also the many non-verbal rabbit-holes that our brains can easily disappear into.
The author is an experimental psychologist, and brings his professional knowledge and experience to bear on this problem—citing many studies, including his own studies from his own lab, in which he undertook to answer precisely the implicit questions of "How can I..." in terms of tackling these matters, from root anxiety (for example) to end-state executive dysfunction (for example).
The writing style isn't dense science though, and is very approachable for all.
The greatest value in this book lies in its prescriptive element, that is to say, its advice, especially in the category of evidence-based things we can do to improve matters for ourselves; beyond generic things like "mindfulness-based stress reduction" to much more specific things like "observe yourself in the 3rd person for a moment" and "take a break to imagine looking back on this later" and "interrupt yourself with a brief manual task". With these sorts of interventions and more, we can shift the voice in our head from critic to coach.
Bottom line: if you would like your brain to let you get on with the things you actually want to do instead of constantly sidetracking you, this is the book for you.
What did you think of today's newsletter?We always love to hear from you, whether you leave us a comment or even just a click in the poll if you're speeding by! |
Wishing you the very best of health today and every day,
The 10almonds Team