Cause or Effect?

There is, however, a major problem that is currently hindering the development of more successful treatments of chronic pain, and that is the inability to discover a plausible root cause of the scale necessary to fit the persons description of their suffering.

So often, there simply isn't any physical proof that a problem exists, and this unfortunately leads to many mis-understandings by healthcare professionals regarding the severity of the problem. In many cases, a lack of knowledge about chronic pain has led them to mistakenly blame the patients state of mind as the reason for the pain they are feeling.

Chronic pain is inconceviable to those who have not experienced it, and unfortunately such a response serves only to represent how little we really understand about this condition.

Another common problem is that the pain itself is only the tip of the iceberg. It is the effect of the pain on the rest of the body that causes the many knock-on effects throughout the entire being. It is the physical and emotional manifestations of these alterations which are often mistakenly thought to be the perpetuating factors, or causes of the pain in the first place.

Both of these situations are compounded by the fact that often deep down, the patient knows that something is not right, but because so many of the symptoms are common, advice from friends, family and medical practitioners is often directed only from their experience, it does not from taking the whole picture of the sufferer into account.

As the chronic pain patient tries to grapple with why they are suffering, they naturally look elsewhere to try to explain their own problems, but the feelings of fustration and disappointment at being mis-understood when yet another potential lead has failed to help them get better only serves to increase confirmation in their own minds that they will suffer a life of ill-health, and never experience true freedom and happiness. Not many double-edged swords come as potentially soul-destroying than this.

In order to try and make some sense of chronic pain, current research trends appear to be centred on determining the links between chronic pain and changes in the biochemical and neurological make-up of distinct parts of the entire being, such as the brain and the nervous system.

Whilst the results to date have been encouraging, and positive links have been made between altered biochemical and neurological states in chronic pain patients when compared to "healthy" controls, the findings have as yet only provided fuel for a "chicken and egg" scenario.

The big question now is "which comes first?" Does the presence of pain cause the biochemical changes to occur within the body, or is there a cause for the observed biochemical changes which results in patients feeling more pain?

At present, there appears to be a swing in favour of the second option by the healthcare community, probably because such findings represent the first tangible evidence that chronic pain actually exists and can potentially be tested for and measured to identify its' type and severity.

From my own experiences, however, I have been left with no choice but to believe that the presence of chronic pain is more than capable of causing biochemically and neurologically altered states within the body, and more perhaps more importantly, that control of the problem which causes the pain enables the entire body to return to a more balanced and natural state.

So, if we are to accept that chronic pain causes the changes, and not vice versa, then we must return to our initial conundrum - "If biochemical/neurological changes in the body don't cause chronic pain, what does, and how do we control it"?

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