What are other therapies available?
This therapy emphasizes acceptance and mindfulness paired with commitment action to make lasting changes that will improve quality of life. The three tenets of ACT are:
- Accepting experiences instead of rejecting them simply because they may cause chronic pain.
- Choosing behaviors mindfully versus allowing automatic or conditioned responses.
- Taking action and having agency in your life rather than becoming paralyzed by unpleasant thoughts, memories, emotions or sensations.
This is a technique that teaches your body to respond to your verbal commands. These commands “tell” your body to relax and help control breathing, blood pressure, heartbeat, and body temperature. The goal of AT is to achieve deep relaxation and reduce stress.
After you learn the technique, you can use it whenever you need or want relief from symptoms of stress, or you can practice it regularly to enjoy the benefits of deep relaxation and prevent the effects of chronic stress.
This is a method that uses the mind to help control a body function that the body normally regulates automatically, such as skin temperature, muscle tension, heart rate, or blood pressure.
When you are first learning biofeedback, you will have sensors attached to your body and to a monitoring device. This provides instant feedback on body function. The biofeedback therapist will then teach you physical and mental exercises that can help you control the function. The results are displayed on the monitor while you learn how to control that function. The monitor beeps or flashes when you achieve the desired change in that body function (such as increasing skin temperature or reducing muscle tension).
CBT is a therapy that is often used to help people think in a healthy way. It focuses on thought (cognitive) and action (behavioural). This is a way to help you stay well or cope with a health problem. It changes the way you think, and how you think affects how you feel.
If you learn how to stop negative thoughts when they occur, you may be better able to care for yourself and handle life’s challenges. You will feel better and you may be better able to avoid or cope with stress, anxiety, and depression.
This addresses the psychological issues that are part of chronic pain. Most people don’t realize just how common chronic pain is and how much it is influenced by the context of our lives. Once medical conditions have been ruled out, pain management therapy can address the influences of unexpressed anger, grief, emotional overwhelm, anxiety, or depression. Unexpressed emotions, desires or needs often affect pain levels.
This is a process by which imagination is used to stimulate all of the senses of the body creating an imaginary experience for the reconstruction of fearful or painful thoughts. For example, if someone is afraid of walking upstairs due to an injury or a negative previous experience with stairs, guided imagery can be used to help them imagine themselves successfully walking up and down stairs eliminating this fear. Guided imagery is also commonly used to aid the healing process. If a patient is experiencing pain in their knee, a clinician may use guided imagery to help them imagine their cells working to replenish their bones, ligaments, tendons, and muscles associated with their knee for optimal functioning.
We treat everything from arthritis to pulled muscles to inflammation with ice packs or heating pads. Treating pain with hot and cold can be extremely effective for a number of different conditions and injuries, and is easily affordable. The tricky part is knowing what situations call for hot, and which calls for cold. Sometimes a single treatment will even include both.
As a general rule of thumb, use ice for acute injuries or pain, along with inflammation and swelling. Use heat for muscle pain or stiffness.
The injections usually contain a corticosteroid medication and a local anesthetic. Often, you can receive one at your doctor’s office. They help relieve pain and inflammation in a specific area of your body. They’re most commonly injected into joints — such as your ankle, elbow, hip, knee, shoulder, spine or wrist. Even the small joints in your hands or feet might benefit from cortisone shots.
Due to potential side effects, the number of shots you can get in a year generally is limited.
This is a therapy that involves rubbing the soft tissues of the body, such as muscles. Massage may be helpful in reducing tension and pain, improving blood flow, and encouraging relaxation. Massage therapists usually apply pressure with their hands, but they can also use their forearms, elbows, or feet. There are at least 80 different types of massage. Some are gentle, and some are very active and intense.
This is a manual soft tissue therapy used to treat pain and improve range of motion. The restricted tissues are manipulated to promote normal sliding and gliding movements of muscles and fascia. Relaxing restricted tissues promotes increased circulation and allows stimulation of the muscles and fascia.
Connecting to peers with similar experiences can be a tremendous support in your journey. Peer support groups:
- Assist with finding and navigating health care and community resources
- Share personal stories of managing chronic pain: fears, barriers, struggles, coping strategies
- Listen and provide a supportive presence
- Decrease isolation and foster social support
Physiotherapists provide a type of treatment you may need when pain makes it hard to move around and do everyday tasks. This treatment helps you move better and may relieve pain. It also helps improve or restore your physical function and your fitness level.
The goal of physiotherapy is to make daily tasks and activities easier. For example, it may help with walking, going upstairs, or getting in and out of bed.
Physiotherapy may be used alone or with other treatments.
You may get treatment at:
● A clinic.
● A hospital.
● A sports or fitness setting
This is rarely used in chronic pain cases. If it is used, it’s generally the last resort. However, if you have serious neurological complications (such as bowel or bladder dysfunction), along with chronic pain, you may need immediate surgery.
If you don’t have neurological complications, it’s typical to try several months of non-surgical treatments, such as physical therapy and medications, before trying surgery. It’s also difficult to treat chronic pain with surgery because often, there’s no identifiable cause of pain. The surgeon can’t operate without knowing what he or she needs to fix. But if non-surgical treatments don’t work and if you have an identifiable cause of your chronic pain that can be addressed via surgery, your doctor may recommend surgery.
The precise procedure is dependent on the cause of your pain, and the surgeon will make the best recommendation.
This is a therapy that uses low-voltage electrical current for pain relief. People use TENS to relieve pain for several different types of illnesses and conditions. They use it most often to treat muscle, joint, or bone problems that occur with illnesses such as osteoarthritis or fibromyalgia, or for conditions such as low back pain, neck pain, tendinitis, or bursitis. People have also used TENS to treat sudden (acute) pain, such as labour pain, and long-lasting (chronic) pain, such as cancer pain.
Although TENS may help relieve pain for some people, its effectiveness has not been proved.