7 ms·

On Overcoming Pain

146 points by bigiain 8y ago

amelius 8y ago
I'm surprised the author was able to determine (and remember) the names of all the drugs they were getting during this perceptional rollercoaster ride.
- xobs 8y ago
  They provided an itemized, timestamped receipt. (Source: Bunnie is a colleague of mine.)
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    Can I bet his memory is always quite good ? even though he was numbed at the time.
painstakingly 8y ago
I suffer from chronic pain that is not curable. The doctors won't prescribe me any pain killers out of fear I could get addicted. Only alternative is a CBT therapy which can keep you stay relatively sane in that insane situation. Every day is a battle between should I just end it now or should I keep on surviving? I find it extremely depressing that medication that could potentially be helpful is illegal here and people seem to have no empathy whilst idea of popping heroin in hospital is totally fine. You probably know where I am getting at... I have tried cannabis but I never could get consistent quality or the same strain so 9 out of 10 times it didn't work and also made me feel impaired. On top of that at least 5 times I got sold spice (hemp flower sprayed with synthetic cannabinoids) and one time I got robbed at a knife point by a "dealer". I cannot understand why person who suffers like me has to go through that? What keeps me alive is Kratom which is also illegal but I can source it from a country where it is legal so the quality is consistent and good. I am saving money to move to a country where I can live as pain free as I can get but every day apart from the struggle I fear I'll become a criminal just because I want to live today. The system is fucked up and nobody cares.
- eaurouge 8y ago
  Can you move to a state/country where you can obtain marijuana legally? Perhaps with a prescription?
  - painstakingly 8y ago
    I am saving money to do that. I need to stay strong.
- coleifer 8y ago
  When your decision of where you live is based on availability of drugs, I think there might be a serious problem lurking, which you may not even be consciously aware of. Good luck nonetheless.
  - tasuki 8y ago
    > I think there might be a serious problem lurking Yes, the chronic pain perhaps?
  - phkahler 8y ago
    Right. It's all due to repressed anger at his mother....
- maccard 8y ago
  > I suffer from chronic pain that is not curable. The doctors won't prescribe me any pain killers out of fear I could get addicted Imagine that, they won't prescribe long term pain killers in case you might get addicted and take them for too long. It's insanity. I hope things work out for!
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Your doctors are doing the right thing here. After a major surgery I was in rehab and on painkillers for the better part of a year. And when they finally cut the painkillers, it's not like the pain was gone. I thought I was in excruciating pain still, and by "thought" I mean it genuinely felt that way. But it's only now years later that I realized that the doctors were right. I eventually came to be perfectly fine without any painkillers, and it's not because the pain went away. The thing is that when you get used to the feeling of numbness painkillers create it exaggerates pain that's otherwise perfectly tolerable. The whole experience somewhat ironically turned me sharply against drugs in general. In my case the doctor should have forcibly cut me off much earlier. He tried, I protested, he relented -- that was a major mistake on his part. These drugs change your perception of normalcy and make you lose context. And it seems like it's every other week there's yet some new discovery of a negative effect of drugs we thought (and many still think) to be relatively harmless such as paracetamol/acetaminophen/tylenol [1]. That link is just a google scholar search for paracetamol since 2014. Worth perusing if you'd like a reason to avoid that bottle or blister pack next time you have some sort of ache or pain. [1] - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=paracetamol&as_ylo=2014 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=paracetamol&as_ylo=2014
aasasd 8y ago
One thing that was rather news to me is how the body falls back into default behaviors of questionable merit. When I was younger, I thought that, afflicted with some pain, I would learn to ignore it and soldier on. Hoo boy. Turns out, chronic pain, when the prospects seem bad, drains your motivation away (even more so with functional neural problems, which simply make you feel like crap 100% of the time). Now, if you happen to be of procrastinating type before that, you're left with zero motivation. Your mind is kinda hazy in the mornings, so you have to rely on your habits to carry you through. Every movement requires effort now. For a lot of illnesses, physical therapy is the right answer—and meanwhile, the instinct says to stay in the chair with a big breakfast and marathon BoJack Horseman.* Maybe later the mind will clear up a bit or the pain will ease up, and you'll swing dumbbells around or go outside. Oh what do you know, it's evening already. This regime made my physique problematic in the first place! Why don't I have an instinct that would tell me to move around and exercise? And this is cumulative, of course—I should be making some better habits for tomorrow, but instead I'm dropping everything that seems of no immediate importance, which is like all that makes life healthy and interesting. So, I once believed that conscious effort would carry me through life—but if you look into pretty basic psychology, the ape brain is way more firm at making day-to-day decisions. It's better to have habits that will work for you in hard times. The sentimental books about how you need to ‘overcome yourself’ were right, only they were distant and nonspecific. * Note that marathoning BoJack Horseman is definitely recommended in different circumstances.
- bitexploder 8y ago
  The conscious mind is weak and will power alone is a laughable force, because it is an illusion. You have to use both logic and emotion. Logic when emotion is weak and emotion when logic fails. For me, it is about tricking your mind into being completely convinced there is no stopping the coming suffering (exercise, pain, whatever). You can call that habits (it is) but how you form and think of the habit is different if you are a procrastinator. I have broken bones and dealt with suffering like Bunnies (not as acutely extreme). There is a peculiar thing analytical people do with suffering and pain and it can be counterproductive. The overanalysis of it and trying to logic it all out. To cope through total understanding. Some of the time it is just easier to use and manipulate your own emotion, this can have a profound effect on reprogramming the brain back to a more normal state compared to trying to reason it all out from a mental perspective on recovery.
codingdave 8y ago
Suffering from chronic pain myself, I had two main thoughts when reading this: 1) "the realization that my life has changed for the worse in irreversible ways" - This is a dangerous perspective. Yes, life has changed, but if you focus on 'for the worse', you step onto a path that leads to depression in 90% of chronic pain patients. I instead focus on what I still can do. I might never be an athlete again, but I can walk. I can take short hikes in the mountains. I've changed my hobbies from an active collection of martial arts, biking, and hiking, into more sedate things like painting and woodworking. I celebrate staying active for half a day instead of dwelling on the fact that I used to be able to move all day. Much of your ability to adapt to chronic pain is mental, not physical, and this is exactly why CBT is recommended as a therapy - to help you to frame your life in positive, productive behaviors that keep you going in the right direction. 2) Everyone's pain is different. There is no single answer for how people deal with it (or fail to deal with it). This post sounded to me less like someone trying to communicate with their audience, and more like someone thinking it through for themselves. So while I had mixed reactions to the details of it all, I think the act of having put it together is likely a healthy move, so I appreciate the effort to have done so.
- e40 8y ago
  Well said. Focus on what you can do. I hat 3 knee surgeries and my Dr said I wouldn't walk, but I didn't listen and walking is what I do. 1+ hour a day. Without it, I have more knee pain. Experiment. Try different things, though try and varying them one at a time, so you can know what has an impact. I never think about the fact that I can't run or ski or whatever.
  - magic_beans 8y ago
    Why on earth would your doctor say that to you? He or she didn't even suggest there might be the possibility of walking? I'm so very glad you ignored your doctor, but I wonder how many people out there didn't and never even tried to walk again after complex knee surgery.
    - e40 8y ago
winchling 8y ago
>if you find yourself in an unfortunate situation, my main advice is to pay attention and learn as much as you can from it. It seems to me that this is the function of pain. If one could voluntarily embrace this process, would this make opioids less necessary and/or desirable?
- magic_beans 8y ago
  > If one could voluntarily embrace this process, would this make opioids less necessary and/or desirable? It certainly would, but "embracing" the process of pain is an enormous mental and physical challenge. Entire religions, for example, are devoted to separating the mind from the experience of the body. But this takes years of conscious effort.
  - winchling 8y ago
    I've noticed that when I stub my toe the suffering is considerably reduced if I focus on the pain.
    - Omnius 8y ago
      By focus you mean jumping around and screaming/cursing at the furniture. Agreed this helps me as well.
      - winchling 8y ago
        Those are the standard tools of distraction which I employed in earlier years. I actually mean standing quietly still and shifting as much 'internal attention' as possible to the injured toe.
intralizee 8y ago
This blog post is beautifully written. The most profound dilemma to me from my own outcome of pain is how "people who haven't lived the specific pain" are calling the shots. How illnesses resulting in physical & psychological pain are handled by treatments tailored by people who haven't experienced the pain. Similar with the allocation of finances and the perception of how one should adapt their outlook on life; based on how outsiders of the experience looking in will decide on what's best. It's comparable to how a victim is so easily coerced & manipulated in a lesser state and when having faith in persons with the status of attempting to help. Personally, I would trade my life in a heart beat for without daily pain and never the experience. Psychologically I can understand why people look to feel grateful for insight or to make people educated about pain. Sadly, I think it's just an irrational attempt in making one try to accept the unfortunate circumstances from the cruel will of the universe.
nate 8y ago
This has been a rough couple years personally and professionally for me. My dad almost died last March from multiple pulmonary embolisms. My mom had breast cancer for the second time. The Highrise drama. But the real weird underlying thing has been this constant chronic pain and other symptoms. I could barely move my left shoulder without a ton of pain. I stopped pushing doors open with my left arm for example to deal with it. I also couldn’t walk up stairs without pain. My knees were awful. I chalked it all up to either stress or just mid life getting old. Then I started getting a ton of fluid in my ears. I thought it was some allergy that I just couldn’t fully combat with antihistamines. It made me feel like I head a head cold. Cloudy. A little dizzy. And this just went on for a couple years. I thought 40 was just my inevitable peak and it all sucks from here. Life took on a real grey hue. Well. My wife made us go on some “anti inflammatory” diet. No gluten. No dairy. No sugar. No alcohol. Low carb. No snacking. I moaned about it for days. After 5 days my body was dramatically better. All the joint pain disappeared. The fluid in my ears is either gone or drastically more manageable right now. I’m still on a similar diet today but not as strict. And I remain feeling really good. I can’t believe I was living with all this chronic pain this long and could have just changed up my diet. So I drop this story here because I bet there’s some other folks out there that could see some impact in their life just being a bit more aware of their diet. For me I have no idea what the real cause is. Sugar? Alcohol? Dairy? I’ve heard from others they have a sensitivity to a food and had similar symptoms. I took a food sensitivity test at everlywell.com which mentions a high sensitivity to brewers yeast. So maybe it’s that. Maybe my body just needed a detox to reboot. Who knows. But I feel great. (The diet I went on was in an ebook from a healthy heart Facebook group https://m.facebook.com/groups/thehappyheartproject/ https://m.facebook.com/groups/thehappyheartproject/) but it isn’t magical or mysterious. You can just figure it out yourself by staying away from the things I mentioned above for 5 days.
- epmaybe 8y ago
  Did you ever add any of those back to see if you could pinpoint a single food group? Or maybe it's a combination of all of them.
- jcousins 8y ago
  I'm always glad to read of another person getting multiple benefits from low/ish carb eating. I live with chronic pain from a spinal infection and also happen to have disordered eating issues. Low carb was _an_ answer to both of those problems. It's not magic, I won't hail it as the one solution to myriad problems but my inflammatory markers, blood sugar markers (reversed t2d), weight (lost 200lbs) and ability to live with a modicum of normality (was bed bound) don't lie. For anyone that likes complex problem solving and wants to start down the low carb road, I cannot recommend Ivor Cummins'[1] and Dr. Jeff Gerber's[2] work on diabetes and cholesterol enough. [1] https://twitter.com/FatEmperor https://twitter.com/FatEmperor [2] https://twitter.com/JeffryGerberMD https://twitter.com/JeffryGerberMD
cdiamand 8y ago
"It’s well documented that trauma imprints itself vividly onto the brain" I tore ligaments in my knee several years ago. The paragraph about the accident was extremely hard to read and caused me actual physical discomfort!
- defined 8y ago
  I’m currently 1 week into recovery from a painful shredded (the surgeon’s words) patellar tendon and repair. On reading certain passages, my afflicted leg (and only that leg) got tingles and goosebumps and the rest of me just... cringed... in horrified empathy. I feel ill just thinking about OP’s pain, and knowing, as OP does, that this is nothing compared to the pain of certain other maladies makes me wonder how anyone can bear it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dlhavema 8y ago
I have near constant neck pain and have done every route I can think to mitigate,manage,cure or deal with it. The strangest part is it switched sides randomly. I've tracked/logged it multiple times and can make no sense of why it switches. I think I need to track more things I'm doing to see what's related to it... neck surgery, stim, acupuncture, multiple types of therapies, heart, cold, massage, etc.. all give negligible results.
- mil0x 8y ago
  I'm sorry to hear you have constant pain. I deal with constant neck pain, and I can tell you two things that really, really helped (after trying pretty much everything and even considering surgery). The first one is reading "Healing Back Pain" by John Sarno. As an engineer the prospect of reading a book to manage pain sounded quite dumb, but I can assure you it removed 90% of the pain. The other thing that worked was taking 0.5mg Clonazepam whenever the pain got worse. I got the prescription from a doctor saying that it works for some patients with chronic pain. Please do yourself a favor and read that book, I hope it helps (it did help a very skeptical me one year ago).
anonacct37 8y ago
I had a shoulder surgery last year. I definitely learned about constant pain and some tips for dealing with it (with and without drugs). Some random observations: Meditation can help. My pain was more connected with my emotional state than I expected (much worse when stressed and much better when distracted by an enjoyable experience). Pain and negative emotions reinforce each other. Narcotics often break the concentration that makes meditation reduce pain. Nevertheless sometimes you gotta load up on narcotics so you can attempt to get the sleep your body needs to heal. In my case I went through about 40 percacet the first week. But took 5-6 weeks for the next 40, and then I was off the heavy stuff and stuck to ibuprofin. My shoulder still hurts.
titzer 8y ago
I managed to injure the epithilium on both eyes and developed corneal lesions after a particularly bad bout of dry eye. I spent more than two weeks at home, hunkering in the dark due to photosensitivity, without any pain medications. The pain was intense enough that it felt like needles going directly into my eyes, with radiating pain that wrapped all the way around my head. With antibiotic eyedrops and therapeutic contact lenses, my eyes were able to heal, but for a time I was at risk of blindness. I sympathize with anyone who has chronic pain, especially the psychological aspect of facing a life severely diminished.
DannyB2 8y ago
I live with chronic pain. (ankylosing spondylitis) I take prescription NSAIDs and other drugs for a long time. Also a lot of acetaminophen per day. (Which I carefully monitor.) I also take, occasionally, narcotic pain killers (hydrocodone). Next January (2019) will be ten years since I added hydrocodone to the drugs I use for this. But it is a tool. Nothing more. I take it only when I need it. I don't have any predictable usage pattern. It is for occasional use only. I have a very healthy fear of taking it at all, but if I'm in enough pain, I'll overcome that and take some. I have a good life and don't want to screw it up with narcotic pain killers. I have never had any resistance when asking for a refill. Neither my primary doctor nor arthritis specialist are worried that I'm taking too much. If anything, I've noticed that in the last couple years, I've slowed down my usage a little bit. (Measured by time between refills.) I think in pain management, the first thing is "learn to live with it", and then, "there are good drugs for days when it is really bad". (just IMO) I'm always looking for the lowest dose I can take that will be effective for any particular episode. I don't want to build up a tolerance. And I suppose I must not have built up a tolerance in ten years of occasional use. I haven't become addicted. But I also don't drink alcohol. Or smoke. Or use very much caffeine. Maybe that is related, or maybe not. I would say that hydrocodone has improved my quality of life. I get out and do things I sometimes wouldn't otherwise do. Last year I was in Colorado and tried some, .... uh, ... products. First, I thought they were pretty pricey compared to hydrocodone, which costs me only $5 for a bottle of 30. Second, while they did help some, I didn't think they were nearly as effective. The hydrocodone is more like a nuclear weapon for pain.
throwaway99874 8y ago
I'm in my mid 30s and have had migraine headaches for well over a decade now. The pain is so intense and overwhelming at times tears flow, and I moan in the dark with the only hope that time will pass and it will eventually get better at some point. The headaches occur as frequently as multiple times a week, and can last for a whole day or days on end (the more severe ones are shorter lived). I go to sleep with pain, and on many days wake up with pain. I have to hold down a job and take care of family, so I put on a wincing face and deal with it. I like to think I can mask the pain well, but my family tells me otherwise. I've tried medicines, injections, and countless remedies over the years and spent a bunch of money on doctors. But there is no reliable cure for me so far. I do all the usual things that people do at my stage in life, I laugh, I play, I go to work and do well ... but I don't think anyone really understands how much I have to kill of myself (my desires, my wish to be in a dark room with no noise and isolated, my wish to sit around and do nothing and just pass out with pain) to get thru each day. That has left me lonely, and a bit distrustful perhaps of people - though I try not to act on that thought. A few years ago, I tried cannabis. Living in a state where it is illegal was a problem - both legally and with my job. I got a few different strains and experimented with it over the course of a few weeks. When I found the strain that worked, I cried. I cried so much. I was pain free in a way that I hadn't known in nearly 2 decades. I didn't even realize how much and where I was hurting. Apart from my head, every muscle in my body was hurting due to the constant strain of dealing with pain. And it was all gone. Gone. I felt like I was born again for a few days. And then it was over. I couldn't continue with it due to it being illegal. It was then I really understood how immoral having at a minimum cannabis not being allowed for medical purposes is. I don't know if it is a long term solution as I didn't have an opportunity to gather enough data and observations - but surely there is potential. I also didn't have any side effects, with the exception of "the munchies" - which is very real :).

146 points by bigiain 8y ago

I'm surprised the author was able to determine (and remember) the names of all the drugs they were getting during this perceptional rollercoaster ride.

xobs 8y ago
They provided an itemized, timestamped receipt. (Source: Bunnie is a colleague of mine.)
- agumonkey 8y ago
  Can I bet his memory is always quite good ? even though he was numbed at the time.

painstakingly 8y ago

I suffer from chronic pain that is not curable. The doctors won't prescribe me any pain killers out of fear I could get addicted. Only alternative is a CBT therapy which can keep you stay relatively sane in that insane situation. Every day is a battle between should I just end it now or should I keep on surviving? I find it extremely depressing that medication that could potentially be helpful is illegal here and people seem to have no empathy whilst idea of popping heroin in hospital is totally fine. You probably know where I am getting at... I have tried cannabis but I never could get consistent quality or the same strain so 9 out of 10 times it didn't work and also made me feel impaired. On top of that at least 5 times I got sold spice (hemp flower sprayed with synthetic cannabinoids) and one time I got robbed at a knife point by a "dealer". I cannot understand why person who suffers like me has to go through that? What keeps me alive is Kratom which is also illegal but I can source it from a country where it is legal so the quality is consistent and good. I am saving money to move to a country where I can live as pain free as I can get but every day apart from the struggle I fear I'll become a criminal just because I want to live today. The system is fucked up and nobody cares.

eaurouge 8y ago
Can you move to a state/country where you can obtain marijuana legally? Perhaps with a prescription?
- painstakingly 8y ago
  I am saving money to do that. I need to stay strong.
coleifer 8y ago
When your decision of where you live is based on availability of drugs, I think there might be a serious problem lurking, which you may not even be consciously aware of. Good luck nonetheless.
- tasuki 8y ago
  > I think there might be a serious problem lurking Yes, the chronic pain perhaps?
- phkahler 8y ago
  Right. It's all due to repressed anger at his mother....
maccard 8y ago
> I suffer from chronic pain that is not curable. The doctors won't prescribe me any pain killers out of fear I could get addicted Imagine that, they won't prescribe long term pain killers in case you might get addicted and take them for too long. It's insanity. I hope things work out for!
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Your doctors are doing the right thing here. After a major surgery I was in rehab and on painkillers for the better part of a year. And when they finally cut the painkillers, it's not like the pain was gone. I thought I was in excruciating pain still, and by "thought" I mean it genuinely felt that way. But it's only now years later that I realized that the doctors were right. I eventually came to be perfectly fine without any painkillers, and it's not because the pain went away. The thing is that when you get used to the feeling of numbness painkillers create it exaggerates pain that's otherwise perfectly tolerable. The whole experience somewhat ironically turned me sharply against drugs in general. In my case the doctor should have forcibly cut me off much earlier. He tried, I protested, he relented -- that was a major mistake on his part. These drugs change your perception of normalcy and make you lose context. And it seems like it's every other week there's yet some new discovery of a negative effect of drugs we thought (and many still think) to be relatively harmless such as paracetamol/acetaminophen/tylenol [1]. That link is just a google scholar search for paracetamol since 2014. Worth perusing if you'd like a reason to avoid that bottle or blister pack next time you have some sort of ache or pain. [1] - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=paracetamol&as_ylo=2014 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=paracetamol&as_ylo=2014

aasasd 8y ago

One thing that was rather news to me is how the body falls back into default behaviors of questionable merit. When I was younger, I thought that, afflicted with some pain, I would learn to ignore it and soldier on. Hoo boy. Turns out, chronic pain, when the prospects seem bad, drains your motivation away (even more so with functional neural problems, which simply make you feel like crap 100% of the time). Now, if you happen to be of procrastinating type before that, you're left with zero motivation. Your mind is kinda hazy in the mornings, so you have to rely on your habits to carry you through. Every movement requires effort now. For a lot of illnesses, physical therapy is the right answer—and meanwhile, the instinct says to stay in the chair with a big breakfast and marathon BoJack Horseman.* Maybe later the mind will clear up a bit or the pain will ease up, and you'll swing dumbbells around or go outside. Oh what do you know, it's evening already. This regime made my physique problematic in the first place! Why don't I have an instinct that would tell me to move around and exercise? And this is cumulative, of course—I should be making some better habits for tomorrow, but instead I'm dropping everything that seems of no immediate importance, which is like all that makes life healthy and interesting. So, I once believed that conscious effort would carry me through life—but if you look into pretty basic psychology, the ape brain is way more firm at making day-to-day decisions. It's better to have habits that will work for you in hard times. The sentimental books about how you need to ‘overcome yourself’ were right, only they were distant and nonspecific. * Note that marathoning BoJack Horseman is definitely recommended in different circumstances.

bitexploder 8y ago
The conscious mind is weak and will power alone is a laughable force, because it is an illusion. You have to use both logic and emotion. Logic when emotion is weak and emotion when logic fails. For me, it is about tricking your mind into being completely convinced there is no stopping the coming suffering (exercise, pain, whatever). You can call that habits (it is) but how you form and think of the habit is different if you are a procrastinator. I have broken bones and dealt with suffering like Bunnies (not as acutely extreme). There is a peculiar thing analytical people do with suffering and pain and it can be counterproductive. The overanalysis of it and trying to logic it all out. To cope through total understanding. Some of the time it is just easier to use and manipulate your own emotion, this can have a profound effect on reprogramming the brain back to a more normal state compared to trying to reason it all out from a mental perspective on recovery.

codingdave 8y ago

Suffering from chronic pain myself, I had two main thoughts when reading this: 1) "the realization that my life has changed for the worse in irreversible ways" - This is a dangerous perspective. Yes, life has changed, but if you focus on 'for the worse', you step onto a path that leads to depression in 90% of chronic pain patients. I instead focus on what I still can do. I might never be an athlete again, but I can walk. I can take short hikes in the mountains. I've changed my hobbies from an active collection of martial arts, biking, and hiking, into more sedate things like painting and woodworking. I celebrate staying active for half a day instead of dwelling on the fact that I used to be able to move all day. Much of your ability to adapt to chronic pain is mental, not physical, and this is exactly why CBT is recommended as a therapy - to help you to frame your life in positive, productive behaviors that keep you going in the right direction. 2) Everyone's pain is different. There is no single answer for how people deal with it (or fail to deal with it). This post sounded to me less like someone trying to communicate with their audience, and more like someone thinking it through for themselves. So while I had mixed reactions to the details of it all, I think the act of having put it together is likely a healthy move, so I appreciate the effort to have done so.

e40 8y ago
Well said. Focus on what you can do. I hat 3 knee surgeries and my Dr said I wouldn't walk, but I didn't listen and walking is what I do. 1+ hour a day. Without it, I have more knee pain. Experiment. Try different things, though try and varying them one at a time, so you can know what has an impact. I never think about the fact that I can't run or ski or whatever.
- magic_beans 8y ago
  Why on earth would your doctor say that to you? He or she didn't even suggest there might be the possibility of walking? I'm so very glad you ignored your doctor, but I wonder how many people out there didn't and never even tried to walk again after complex knee surgery.
  - e40 8y ago

winchling 8y ago

>if you find yourself in an unfortunate situation, my main advice is to pay attention and learn as much as you can from it. It seems to me that this is the function of pain. If one could voluntarily embrace this process, would this make opioids less necessary and/or desirable?

magic_beans 8y ago
> If one could voluntarily embrace this process, would this make opioids less necessary and/or desirable? It certainly would, but "embracing" the process of pain is an enormous mental and physical challenge. Entire religions, for example, are devoted to separating the mind from the experience of the body. But this takes years of conscious effort.
- winchling 8y ago
  I've noticed that when I stub my toe the suffering is considerably reduced if I focus on the pain.
  - Omnius 8y ago
    By focus you mean jumping around and screaming/cursing at the furniture. Agreed this helps me as well.
    - winchling 8y ago
      Those are the standard tools of distraction which I employed in earlier years. I actually mean standing quietly still and shifting as much 'internal attention' as possible to the injured toe.

intralizee 8y ago

This blog post is beautifully written. The most profound dilemma to me from my own outcome of pain is how "people who haven't lived the specific pain" are calling the shots. How illnesses resulting in physical & psychological pain are handled by treatments tailored by people who haven't experienced the pain. Similar with the allocation of finances and the perception of how one should adapt their outlook on life; based on how outsiders of the experience looking in will decide on what's best. It's comparable to how a victim is so easily coerced & manipulated in a lesser state and when having faith in persons with the status of attempting to help. Personally, I would trade my life in a heart beat for without daily pain and never the experience. Psychologically I can understand why people look to feel grateful for insight or to make people educated about pain. Sadly, I think it's just an irrational attempt in making one try to accept the unfortunate circumstances from the cruel will of the universe.

nate 8y ago

This has been a rough couple years personally and professionally for me. My dad almost died last March from multiple pulmonary embolisms. My mom had breast cancer for the second time. The Highrise drama. But the real weird underlying thing has been this constant chronic pain and other symptoms. I could barely move my left shoulder without a ton of pain. I stopped pushing doors open with my left arm for example to deal with it. I also couldn’t walk up stairs without pain. My knees were awful. I chalked it all up to either stress or just mid life getting old. Then I started getting a ton of fluid in my ears. I thought it was some allergy that I just couldn’t fully combat with antihistamines. It made me feel like I head a head cold. Cloudy. A little dizzy. And this just went on for a couple years. I thought 40 was just my inevitable peak and it all sucks from here. Life took on a real grey hue. Well. My wife made us go on some “anti inflammatory” diet. No gluten. No dairy. No sugar. No alcohol. Low carb. No snacking. I moaned about it for days. After 5 days my body was dramatically better. All the joint pain disappeared. The fluid in my ears is either gone or drastically more manageable right now. I’m still on a similar diet today but not as strict. And I remain feeling really good. I can’t believe I was living with all this chronic pain this long and could have just changed up my diet. So I drop this story here because I bet there’s some other folks out there that could see some impact in their life just being a bit more aware of their diet. For me I have no idea what the real cause is. Sugar? Alcohol? Dairy? I’ve heard from others they have a sensitivity to a food and had similar symptoms. I took a food sensitivity test at everlywell.com which mentions a high sensitivity to brewers yeast. So maybe it’s that. Maybe my body just needed a detox to reboot. Who knows. But I feel great. (The diet I went on was in an ebook from a healthy heart Facebook group https://m.facebook.com/groups/thehappyheartproject/ https://m.facebook.com/groups/thehappyheartproject/) but it isn’t magical or mysterious. You can just figure it out yourself by staying away from the things I mentioned above for 5 days.

epmaybe 8y ago
Did you ever add any of those back to see if you could pinpoint a single food group? Or maybe it's a combination of all of them.
jcousins 8y ago
I'm always glad to read of another person getting multiple benefits from low/ish carb eating. I live with chronic pain from a spinal infection and also happen to have disordered eating issues. Low carb was _an_ answer to both of those problems. It's not magic, I won't hail it as the one solution to myriad problems but my inflammatory markers, blood sugar markers (reversed t2d), weight (lost 200lbs) and ability to live with a modicum of normality (was bed bound) don't lie. For anyone that likes complex problem solving and wants to start down the low carb road, I cannot recommend Ivor Cummins'[1] and Dr. Jeff Gerber's[2] work on diabetes and cholesterol enough. [1] https://twitter.com/FatEmperor https://twitter.com/FatEmperor [2] https://twitter.com/JeffryGerberMD https://twitter.com/JeffryGerberMD

cdiamand 8y ago

"It’s well documented that trauma imprints itself vividly onto the brain" I tore ligaments in my knee several years ago. The paragraph about the accident was extremely hard to read and caused me actual physical discomfort!

defined 8y ago
I’m currently 1 week into recovery from a painful shredded (the surgeon’s words) patellar tendon and repair. On reading certain passages, my afflicted leg (and only that leg) got tingles and goosebumps and the rest of me just... cringed... in horrified empathy. I feel ill just thinking about OP’s pain, and knowing, as OP does, that this is nothing compared to the pain of certain other maladies makes me wonder how anyone can bear it.

deleted 8y ago

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dlhavema 8y ago

I have near constant neck pain and have done every route I can think to mitigate,manage,cure or deal with it. The strangest part is it switched sides randomly. I've tracked/logged it multiple times and can make no sense of why it switches. I think I need to track more things I'm doing to see what's related to it... neck surgery, stim, acupuncture, multiple types of therapies, heart, cold, massage, etc.. all give negligible results.

mil0x 8y ago
I'm sorry to hear you have constant pain. I deal with constant neck pain, and I can tell you two things that really, really helped (after trying pretty much everything and even considering surgery). The first one is reading "Healing Back Pain" by John Sarno. As an engineer the prospect of reading a book to manage pain sounded quite dumb, but I can assure you it removed 90% of the pain. The other thing that worked was taking 0.5mg Clonazepam whenever the pain got worse. I got the prescription from a doctor saying that it works for some patients with chronic pain. Please do yourself a favor and read that book, I hope it helps (it did help a very skeptical me one year ago).

anonacct37 8y ago

I had a shoulder surgery last year. I definitely learned about constant pain and some tips for dealing with it (with and without drugs). Some random observations: Meditation can help. My pain was more connected with my emotional state than I expected (much worse when stressed and much better when distracted by an enjoyable experience). Pain and negative emotions reinforce each other. Narcotics often break the concentration that makes meditation reduce pain. Nevertheless sometimes you gotta load up on narcotics so you can attempt to get the sleep your body needs to heal. In my case I went through about 40 percacet the first week. But took 5-6 weeks for the next 40, and then I was off the heavy stuff and stuck to ibuprofin. My shoulder still hurts.

titzer 8y ago

I managed to injure the epithilium on both eyes and developed corneal lesions after a particularly bad bout of dry eye. I spent more than two weeks at home, hunkering in the dark due to photosensitivity, without any pain medications. The pain was intense enough that it felt like needles going directly into my eyes, with radiating pain that wrapped all the way around my head. With antibiotic eyedrops and therapeutic contact lenses, my eyes were able to heal, but for a time I was at risk of blindness. I sympathize with anyone who has chronic pain, especially the psychological aspect of facing a life severely diminished.

DannyB2 8y ago

I live with chronic pain. (ankylosing spondylitis) I take prescription NSAIDs and other drugs for a long time. Also a lot of acetaminophen per day. (Which I carefully monitor.) I also take, occasionally, narcotic pain killers (hydrocodone). Next January (2019) will be ten years since I added hydrocodone to the drugs I use for this. But it is a tool. Nothing more. I take it only when I need it. I don't have any predictable usage pattern. It is for occasional use only. I have a very healthy fear of taking it at all, but if I'm in enough pain, I'll overcome that and take some. I have a good life and don't want to screw it up with narcotic pain killers. I have never had any resistance when asking for a refill. Neither my primary doctor nor arthritis specialist are worried that I'm taking too much. If anything, I've noticed that in the last couple years, I've slowed down my usage a little bit. (Measured by time between refills.) I think in pain management, the first thing is "learn to live with it", and then, "there are good drugs for days when it is really bad". (just IMO) I'm always looking for the lowest dose I can take that will be effective for any particular episode. I don't want to build up a tolerance. And I suppose I must not have built up a tolerance in ten years of occasional use. I haven't become addicted. But I also don't drink alcohol. Or smoke. Or use very much caffeine. Maybe that is related, or maybe not. I would say that hydrocodone has improved my quality of life. I get out and do things I sometimes wouldn't otherwise do. Last year I was in Colorado and tried some, .... uh, ... products. First, I thought they were pretty pricey compared to hydrocodone, which costs me only $5 for a bottle of 30. Second, while they did help some, I didn't think they were nearly as effective. The hydrocodone is more like a nuclear weapon for pain.

throwaway99874 8y ago

I'm in my mid 30s and have had migraine headaches for well over a decade now. The pain is so intense and overwhelming at times tears flow, and I moan in the dark with the only hope that time will pass and it will eventually get better at some point. The headaches occur as frequently as multiple times a week, and can last for a whole day or days on end (the more severe ones are shorter lived). I go to sleep with pain, and on many days wake up with pain. I have to hold down a job and take care of family, so I put on a wincing face and deal with it. I like to think I can mask the pain well, but my family tells me otherwise. I've tried medicines, injections, and countless remedies over the years and spent a bunch of money on doctors. But there is no reliable cure for me so far. I do all the usual things that people do at my stage in life, I laugh, I play, I go to work and do well ... but I don't think anyone really understands how much I have to kill of myself (my desires, my wish to be in a dark room with no noise and isolated, my wish to sit around and do nothing and just pass out with pain) to get thru each day. That has left me lonely, and a bit distrustful perhaps of people - though I try not to act on that thought. A few years ago, I tried cannabis. Living in a state where it is illegal was a problem - both legally and with my job. I got a few different strains and experimented with it over the course of a few weeks. When I found the strain that worked, I cried. I cried so much. I was pain free in a way that I hadn't known in nearly 2 decades. I didn't even realize how much and where I was hurting. Apart from my head, every muscle in my body was hurting due to the constant strain of dealing with pain. And it was all gone. Gone. I felt like I was born again for a few days. And then it was over. I couldn't continue with it due to it being illegal. It was then I really understood how immoral having at a minimum cannabis not being allowed for medical purposes is. I don't know if it is a long term solution as I didn't have an opportunity to gather enough data and observations - but surely there is potential. I also didn't have any side effects, with the exception of "the munchies" - which is very real :).