Hi. I'm Rowe Jones, a former chronic pain sufferer. This site is all about supplying you with the latest information on chronic pain (headache, back pain, arthritis and fibromyalgia). I also want to help motivate you to help make your life a little brighter.
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The Pleasant Truths About Pain
In the short term, pain keeps you alive. It’s an essential warning signal, a command that is impossible to ignore. When you yank your finger off a hot stove—or sit down to get the pebble out of a shoe—pain is doing its job.
When the alert system goes awry, chronic pain may set in. It can arise mysteriously, persist for a long time and be very difficult to treat. Sometimes the cause is obvious. But pain’s origin may be elusive—an inexplicable headache or a bad back that won’t stop hurting. Finding surefire treatments has been difficult because the phenomenon is so complicated. Emotions, memory and expectations all influence chronic pain, and in turn are influenced by it.
Because persistent pain is so complex, a cure for it is not yet on the horizon. But while we wait, a new understanding of why we hurt offers opportunities to use our minds to soften the sting.
Heartburn and Heartbreak: It’s All Connected
When you are in agony, the last thing you want to be told is that it’s all in your head. But in truth, pain does come from your head, in a group of interconnected brain regions known as the pain matrix. Some regions are involved in delivering descriptive information about the feeling—where it is, how intense it is, whether it’s a dull soreness or a sharp prick. Another part, the anterior cingulate cortex, registers the unpleasant “hurt” of pain. It connects the physical sensation of pain to feelings of distress.
Interestingly, the anterior cingulate cortex doesn’t distinguish between psychic and bodily injury—it lights up whether you’ve been hit in the stomach or hit by rejection—and is sensitive to your state of mind. “It is particularly dampened by good mood and enhanced by a bad mood,” says M. Catherine Bushnell, director of the McGill University Centre for Research on Pain. “Change the mood, and it changes the pain.” One of Bushnell’s patients had brain damage that destroyed sensory regions but left his cingulate intact. When he was pinched and prodded with his eyes closed, he didn’t know if it was his left arm or toe that hurt, says Bushnell. “All he knew was that he didn’t like it.”
