Objectives
- Your brain memorizes every action you take, every second, to determine whether it is safe or threatening.
- It is how every living creature sustains life. The penalties in the wild are severe and swift, and humans are close behind.
- Repetition deeply embeds these circuits. Pain sensations are particularly problematic since they are intense and frequent.
- Interventions that focus on structural abnormalities cannot work and usually don’t.
- The key is to transcend the pain by stimulating the formation of alternate circuits. Memorized pain is solvable.
Understanding how powerfully and quickly pain circuits become embedded in the nervous system matters It happens the same way you learn anything—through repetition. Pain impulses flood your brain much faster than those in the brain of an athlete, artist, or musician learning a new skill. One common example is learning to ride a bicycle. Once you know how, it is almost impossible to unlearn it. Think how much unconscious brain activity is required to perform all the functions in addition to maintaining your balance.
An extreme example of memorized pathways is phantom limb pain. When patients require an amputation for diabetes or peripheral vascular disease, the body part is deprived of blood and oxygen, and the response is often extreme pain. A heart attack is a classic example of the heart muscle not being supplied with enough oxygen to keep it alive. In phantom limb pain, we can identify the source of the pain — the body recognizes that not enough blood is being supplied to the limb, which is painful.
Now, let’s look at the example of RSD of an arm, which is painful despite having a normal blood supply.
Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy
RSD stands for “reflex sympathetic dystrophy.” The sympathetic nervous system is a separate nervous system from the main nerves in your body. It causes blood vessels to expand or constrict, increases your heart rate, opens or closes the pathways to your lungs, influences the skin by causing sweating or clamminess, and more.
For reasons that are unclear, a person can have a major or minor trauma to an arm that will set off an extraordinarily painful process where the whole arm becomes extremely painful, and it DOESN’T STOP. You don’t get used to it, and it is considered one of the worst pain syndromes that exist. The arm often becomes cold, discolored, and intermittently swells. Even the slightest touch can cause agony. Unfortunately, in the face of clear manifestations of the problem, these patients often are labeled by their doctors as having psychological issues–the “pain must be in their head.” In addition to experiencing extreme agony, they are not believed. Talk about feeling trapped and frustrated.
Normal arms amputated
In 1995, a paper was published that reported on a series of 28 patients who underwent an amputation of their arm for relief of their pain caused by RSD.(1) Guess how many achieved relief of their arm pain–two. The anatomy of these amputated arms was NORMAL. There was no lack of blood supply. No soft tissue damage from trauma. They just experienced an unexplained imbalance of their sympathetic nervous system. The current term for the problem is “CRPS” (chronic regional pain syndrome).
Please think about this report for a while. This is the way the nervous system works. It is how we learn everything. With repetition, neurological circuits form and are reinforced. This occurs with essentially every action we take every day. Your brain instantly perceives danger and remembers it. How many times do you need to learn not to stare at the sun or touch a hot stove? The repetition of chronic pain impulses is stronger than almost any other learned behavior. These are not imaginary sensations. They are strong, deeply etched-in pathways. They can occur in any part of the body and take many forms.
Having a normally functional arm amputated is an act of desperation. You must consider the nervous system, with or without surgical intervention. Fortunately, this problem is treatable using the concepts presented on this website, in my books Calm Your Body Heal Your Mind, Back in Control, and in my course “The DOC Journey.” The approach allows your brain to build alternate circuits that don’t have pain, and the pain circuits atrophy with disuse.
I discuss this in the Video: Memorizing the Circuits: Phantom Pain.
Reference
- Dielissen, P. W., A. T. P. M. Claassen, P. H. J. M. Veldman, and R. J. A. Gori. “Amputation for Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy.” Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (British Volume) 77-B, no. 2 (1995): 270–7. doi.org.
JYR, BF