Quite often we can be feeling down with a nagging pain but when someone asks how we are, we tend to say fine and get on with things. But recent research shows that 28 million people in the UK are living with chronic pain, triple the number experts had presumed, say researchers in a recent BMJ report who worked out the new estimate by searching thousands of medical studies to find the best available data to quantify the burden.
By their calculations, between a third and half of UK adults experience pain that lasts for more than three months, said the BBC. And, with an ageing population, they predict the toll will rise in the future.
Olivia Belle from Arthritis Research UK, which part-funded the work, said: “If we are going to address this growing need, we need better pain management and better treatments to relieve pain.”
Pain is a signal that something needs attention. Pain should be taken seriously and never treated as just ‘all in the mind’. But our psychological attitudes, beliefs, expectations and general well-being can have direct effects on how we feel pain.
Depression, anxiety, boredom and relaxation all influence the intensity of physical pain because the mind and body influence one another.
And this is where clinical hypnotherapy plays an important role.
The National Council for Hypnotherapy says hypnotherapy can be ‘highly effective in dealing with pain management’ and people often undergo surgery and dental work using hypnosis as the anaesthetic.
When seeing a therapist for chronic pain, it is advisable that the pain is checked out by a GP first for a formal diagnosis.
Given that mind and body influence one another. Hypnosis can be used to influence both psychological reference to the pain and physical experience of it and the therapist will ask the client to rate the pain on a scale of 1 to 10.
This is part of finding out how the person feels about their chronic pain, whether it is seeing as and they can do nothing about or do they think they can control it.
The pain scale is important as the experience of pain is very subjective and how the brain interprets pain signals can differ from person to person so that what might be unbearable for one client might be tolerable in another. Sometimes people describe the pain as being worse when they are stressed and their muscles are tensed up.
The bonus from hypnotherapy is that many chronic pain sufferers find the progressive relaxation technique by self-hypnosis is easy to learn, so can leave the hypnotherapy session feeling that they already have a tool to help them manage their pain. This is an essential part of pain management and hypnotherapy.
In the BMJ research, Dr Alan Fayaz and his team found the data suggests that 43% of the estimated 65 million population experience some form of chronic pain and 14% of UK adults live with chronic widespread pain.
They also found that 8% of UK adults experience chronic nerve (neuropathic) pain, 5.5% live with fibromyalgia – a long-term condition that causes simultaneous pain in many different parts of the body. They added that women were more likely than men to be affected by chronic pain, irrespective of age or pain type.
Pain is often a symptom of another underlying medical condition, but Dr Fayaz said should be seen a disease in itself and taken more seriously by society.