A Mind-Body Connection

If you have a basic understanding of pain or if you read my previous blog post, you will know that pain deals with signals and connections between nerves in the body and the brain. We now have scientific insight to a whole other side to “mind-body connection” and the sensation of pain. In the last decade or so, there is a new popular idea backed by research that your brain sends signals alarming your body is in pain when the body never sent nerve signals that the body was in danger. This would mean that the brain is perceiving pain that may or may not be necessarily triggered at that moment or to a greater or lesser extent! There is a big element of pain that is made up in your mind! Let me be clear about a few things; pain that is made up in the brain does not mean that the person tries to convince themselves that they are hurting and then all the sudden – poof—there is pain. This idea is legitimate, proven, and effects everyone. Your mind has control over your health and how your body feels. This “mind-body connection” could help explain why everyone has a different pain threshold, pain in nonexistent limbs, and chronic pain in many cases. If you have 15 minutes, I highly suggest watching this TED Talk Lorimer Moseley gave on why things hurt, or rather, why some things hurt when they shouldn’t necessarily hurt. In his video, he talks about his own experience with this complex phenomenon. He describes as he walked through a bush the first day, twigs and branches scratched and cut up his legs, yet he was in no extreme amount of pain. His pain changed when he was bit by a snake and almost died. The next time he walked through the bush, he perceived extreme pain. There was no way that the sensations on his skin from the bush put him in that amount of pain, so what did? His brain rewired itself to produce massive amounts of pain while in the bush because that previous experience was linked to the event of the snake bite in those bushes. From an evolutionary stand point, this rewiring mechanism could have saved us from many dangers out in the wild, but today, in our lives now, many of these rewiring scenarios may be less necessary, or even a nuisance, and cause sensations of pain triggered by these experiences. Another more common example of this phenomenon is often seen when old people bend down to pick something up and they “throw out their back.” When the person bent down and felt extreme sharp pain, they probably didn’t break a vertebrae or dislocate their spine. If there was no serious tissue damage or measurable tissue damage at all, a rewired brain would perfectly make sense. The person could have had an injury that rewired the brain to cause pain to warn the body to stay out of that position because it could be dangerous.

So if real sensation of pain can be made up in the brain, can the brain also be taught or trained to alleviate pain? In short, science says yes. We often have a number of options to treat the brain-triggered pain, though it can be very difficult. The most common has become medication like narcotics; this method will not help the underlying problem, it can only mask the pain and could cause other harmful side effects. The next method is to retrain the brain that it doesn’t have to produce the sensation of perceived pain. I will explore this method later on in my blog. The last option is another fascinating phenomenon that deals with the “mind-body connection”; I will call this the placebo effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwd-wLdIHjs  - Lorimer Moseley’s TED Talk on why things hurt.