What Your Doctor Never Told You About Chronic Pain

By Jed Diamond, PhD, LCSW

For years I suffered from chronic pain that I believed began when my shoulder was injured playing football in high school. As I got older the pain increased and kept me from getting a good night’s sleep and being able to do the things I needed to do both at home and work. I tried everything I thought might help—drugs, exercise, and chiropractors. When I was considering surgery as a last resort, I learned the real cause of chronic pain. If you suffer from back pain, neck pain, headaches, migraines, or pain anywhere in your body, you are not alone.

Pain affects more Americans than diabetes, heart disease, and cancer combined. The chart below depicts the number of chronic pain sufferers compared to other major health conditions.

“Pain is the classic example of a double-edged sword,” says journalist John Scott. “It’s a very clever system for warning us that something is wrong with the body—think of it as the dog that barks in the night to warn you of a robber entering your home. But once you have the message, you want the dog to stop barking. Except pain does not come with an on/off switch. Like a dog that lacks training, it will not obey your commands. If the cause of the pain is an accidental injury, it will most likely heal and the pain will fade of its own accord. But if the pain persists, you have to make an emotional adjustment.”

The thought of making “an emotional adjustment” to pain seemed absurd to me. Was Scott trying to tell me the pain was “all in my head?” I knew better. The pain was real and I wanted real relief. If drugs didn’t help and Chiropractic wouldn’t help, maybe I needed surgery. After all most athletes have multiple surgeries to correct problems that occurred during their sports career. But the thought of surgery scared me. Too many people I knew had surgery for pain and ended up in worse shape than when they began.

“Medicine has made great inroads into the control of acutely painful conditions using medications and anesthetic techniques,” says chronic pain specialist Chris Stewart-Patterson, MD. “It has also had some success with the types of pain associated with terminal cancer, using morphine and related drugs. But the long-term pain that attends nonfatal conditions—such as injuries or lower back maladies—often responds poorly to standard medical treatments.”

John Sarno, MD: The Real Truth About Chronic Pain

Most of us accept, often without thinking, the common belief that all our pain has a physical cause. “I have never seen a patient with pain in the neck, shoulders, back or buttocks who didn’t believe the pain was due to an injury,” says John E. Sarno, MD, author of Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection. Sarno describes the common causes his patients offer in their attempt to understand their pain. “I hurt myself while playing basketball/tennis/bowling,” “The pain started after I lifted my little girl/when I tried to open a stuck window,” or “Ten years ago I was involved in a hit-from-behind auto accident, and I have had recurrent pain ever since.” It seems so evident that pain is caused by some injury that we don’t often give it a second thought.

Since 1973, Dr. Sarno has conducted research and clinical practice on disorders relating to musculoskeletal pain. Dr. Sarno was one of the first researchers to recognize that chronic back pain, so pervasive in our culture, could not be adequately treated without acknowledging the emotional aspects of pain. Through his groundbreaking experience, Dr. Sarno has identified the cause of most common back, neck, shoulder, and limb pain, and in doing so he has changed the way we can look at pain and its treatment.

Although it might seem reasonable to assume that the cause of the pain is the physical abnormality that was found through medical testing, it turns out to be wrong. Dr. Sarno looked at the medical literature and found an interesting study in the New England Journal of Medicine. It showed that if you take one hundred middle-aged people who have NO back pain and do MRI scans on them, 65 percent will have a slipped disc or spinal stenosis. In other words, these people who have no back pain have conditions that are blamed for most of the world’s back pain.

Sarno pondered this finding, “If the disc isn’t causing this pain, then what is?” He discovered that his patients had chronic tension and spasm of the muscles of the neck, back, shoulder, or buttocks. Then Dr. Sarno asked himself, “Why would someone have chronically tensed muscles to begin with?” He added to this knowledge something he knew from observation: that many of us grow up learning, on an unconscious level, that it’s not okay to feel or express our anger or anxiety.

I realize it may be a stretch for some men to accept that their pain may be caused by their emotions, rather than the physical injury. But this is in fact what more and more practitioners are finding, and here is the good news about this. You have the power to treat your own pain, and you can do it without surgery, drugs, or other invasive interventions.

Energy Medicine: A New Approach for Treating Chronic Pain

When I was at my wits end and contemplating surgery my doctor suggested I might try an energy medicine approach called Emotional Freedom Techniques or EFT. It sounded a bit strange to me, but I was ready to try anything. The approach is described as “acupuncture without needles.” After just a few sessions addressing the emotional components related to the injury, I was amazed to find that EFT really worked. The neck and shoulder pain that had troubled me for years went away. And what’s even better, it hasn’t returned. My wife found it also worked for her migraines.

After my experience I wanted to learn more. I did extensive research and wrote a book, Stress Relief for Men: How to Use the Revolutionary Tools of Energy Healing to Live Well. I talk about how we can deal with everything from chronic pain to irritable male syndrome and depression. This is truly mind-body medicine at its best. More and more doctors are changing their attitudes and getting on board with heart surgeon, Mehmet Oz, MD who says, “the future of medicine is energy medicine.”

The good news is that this kind of medicine, energy medicine, is available to everyone. It works for men and women. It is inexpensive, and for those suffering from chronic pain, it can be a godsend. I’d enjoy hearing your comments and experiences. If you’d like more information about my work in helping people lead a healthier, pain-free life, contact me at www.MenAlive.com

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Jed Diamond, PhD, LCSW, is the Founder and Director of the MenAlive, a health program that helps men live well throughout their lives. Though focused on men’s health, MenAlive is also for women who care about the health of the men in their lives. Diamond’s new book, Stress Relief for Men: How to Use the Revolutionary Tools of Energy Healing to Live Well, brings together the wisdom accumulated in 40 years helping more than 20,000 men, women, and children.