Pain is problematic.
As a society, chronic pain is said to cost $33billion per year (and those figures are from 2007). It is estimated that 1 in 4 Australians have chronic pain that has defied normal healing time.
Pain gets a pretty bad rap. The thing is, it is necessary. How wonderful would it be to never feel pain? Actually, not all that wonderful. You wouldn’t know that your appendix is about to rupture. You wouldn’t know you had cut yourself badly and are bleeding profusely. You wouldn’t know that you are having a heart attack. You probably wouldn’t be alive.
Pain is a mighty defender – although we often view it as the offender. Even when it is terrible and persisting, pain is trying to do the job of defending us. It is defending us from perceived threat. Threat that the brain has calculated based on your own individual formula of threat versus safety.
It is possible then that persisting pain can be altered. It comes down changing the equation of pain.