Chronic pain affects 1 in 5 Australians. It is a terrible illness that can take control of someone’s life and cause many difficulties and discomfort. Usually the result of an injury or disease, pain can linger and alter the way life is lived and limit the potential for happiness and satisfaction.
What is developed in our bodies as an alarm system for when we are under threat of injury or sickness, pain is a tool that can aid greatly in our survival. But chronic pain can persist long after this warning is needed and our body has healed. This chronic pain can be a result of biological, psychological and social factors:
- Biological – Our body has some sort of physical trauma or deformity.
- Psychological – Stress and anxiety may have taken focus on pain and can exacerbate the problem.
- Social – Our own home and work environments and the people within them should be considered as sources of pain.
To manage this pain, we must consider medicinal and physical therapy options along with psychological and cognitive therapy. Medicine can be used to alleviate the sensations of pain, but it cannot be relied upon for dealing with chronic pain entirely. The nature of pain and the systems it uses within our bodies are incredibly complex, therefore physical, psychological and cognitive therapy must also be used to help deal with chronic pain.
At Brain Training Australia™, we focus on the psychological and cognitive therapy components. We look closely at your relationship with pain and work with our clients on a one-to-one basis to examine stress and anxiety, alongside the social and environmental contributory factors. We do not medicate or treat the pain instead with work with brain-based therapies to get to the root cause of the issue, which may not solely be physical or medicinal in nature, and which may be drive psychologically or in response to social factors.
