Feeling stuck with "mystery" pain?
Understanding Neuroplastic Pain: A Blueprint for Healing
If you're having unexplainable chronic pain and your medical experts still haven't found an underlying cause, you could be experiencing neuroplastic pain.
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Recent research has demonstrated that many chronic pain conditions, including headaches, fibromyalgia symptoms, repetitive strain injuries, back pain, and neck pain, are not caused by structural issues but rather by reversible psychophysiologic processes.(1, 2, 3) We call this neuroplastic pain.
Pain is an signal for danger, it means that something is wrong and we should stop doing whatever is causing the pain. The injured body part sends a signal to the brain, the brain interprets the signal and give us pain. But sometimes the brain can be wrong and misinterpret safe signals from the body as harmful, which leads to neuroplastic pain. It's like a car alarm going off when the garbage truck goes by - it's a false alarm.
This doesn't mean that the pain is imaginary, even though it can be treated psychologically. Actually, research on brain imaging has shown that the pain is real. (4) Our brains are always changing as we learn new information. For example when we pick up a new skill, or learning to use a new software program at work, new neuropathways are created. Research shows that chronic pain is often a result of learned neuropathways in the brain (5). This is actually good new because if pain is something our brain learned, we can also unlearn it and create a new way forward. Citations
How do I know if I have neuroplastic pain?
Neuroplastic pain often has characteristics that can help us identify it. It doesn't behave like typical physical pain. For example, the pain may have come without any injury. Or if there was an injury, the pain lasts longer than the normal healing window, like my sprained ankle not recovering for years. Some conditions are often neuroplastic, including migraines, fibromyalgia symptoms and irritable bowl syndrome. For a list of conditions that may be neuroplastic, click here.
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For a downloadable copy of Assessing Neuroplastic Pain, click here.
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If you'd like to find out more about neuroplastic pain and see if coaching might be right for you, let me know.