Avoiding Common Chronic Pain Triggers This Thanksgiving

November 24, 2021 / Thomas Cohn, MD

Chronic pain rarely takes a holiday, and in fact, holidays can oftentimes bring our chronic pain conditions to the surface. That’s why so many chronic pain patients dread the holidays, especially one like Thanksgiving that can throw a lot of triggers your way. However, if you are aware of these triggers and do what you can to avoid them, we’re confident that you’ll be able to have a more enjoyable holiday. In today’s blog, we share some tips on how to avoid some common chronic pain triggers this Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving Chronic Pain Triggers

If any of these can cause your chronic pain to flare up, be proactive and take some steps to help avoid them.

Lack of Quality Sleep – Lack of quality sleep is a common trigger for patients with chronic pain. Sleep is a restorative process that rids our bodies of waste products and calms inflammation. If your body can’t effectively do this, a flareup may follow. There are a number of potential hazards to quality sleep around the holidays, so be aware of these triggers and make it a point to try to get quality sleep. Don’t stay up way past your bedtime with family and friends, don’t drink caffeinated beverages late in the evening, limit your alcohol intake and try to make your sleeping environment as conducive to quality and uninterrupted sleep as possible.

Unhealthy Foods – You may be looking forward to the Thanksgiving meal, but that can come back to haunt you if you’re not careful. High fat and carbohydrate-dense foods can trigger inflammation and lead to a chronic pain flareup, as can alcohol and caffeinated beverages. Even overeating can leave you feeling lethargic and without energy to move, and we all know that movement helps to fight back against chronic pain conditions. Slow your eating pace, grab some healthy options and wash it down with water.

Extended Travel – Another common chronic pain trigger is extended time in the same position. If you’re going to be in a car or on a plane for an extended period of time, your body can get stiff, muscles can spasm and chronic pain can set in. Stretch before you get in the vehicle and move around when possible at gas stations or when you’re free to move about the cabin. This will help improve circulation and keep healthy blood pumping to all areas of your body. Drink plenty of water along the way to stay hydrated, and leave a little early so that those pit stops to stretch and move don’t make you late.

Hours On Your Feet – If you’re hosting Thanksgiving, prepping sides or just helping with cleanup afterwards, all that time standing can lead to a flareup. Don’t try to do everything yourself, and when a task lends itself to sitting down, pull up a chair. You can dice potatoes or prepare gravy while sitting down, so take advantage of time when you can be off your feet. Don’t be afraid to wear supportive shoes while you’re cooking or cleaning either, and that will help take some of the stress of the hardwood floor off your feet.

Keep these aspects of Thanksgiving in mind and work to stay ahead of a flareup over the upcoming holiday stretch. And if you want a physician to assist with your chronic pain condition, reach out to Dr. Cohn and his team today.

How To Gain Independence From Chronic Pain

July 1, 2021 / Thomas Cohn, MD

Independence Day is right around the corner. It’s a day when we all take time to celebrate America’s independence from Britain and spend time with friends and family. And while America was able to break free from something that was holding it back, chronic pain patients yearn for that same ability to be able to free themselves from their pain condition.

In today’s blog, we take a closer look at some of the things you can do to help you gain independence from your chronic pain condition.

Breaking Free From Chronic Pain

When it comes to gaining independence from a chronic pain condition, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy that will be perfect for every patient. With that in mind, there are some general things you can do to help make it more likely that you can overcome your condition or help reduce symptoms. Here’s a look at some helpful ways to break free from your chronic pain condition.

1. Exercise and Movement – Exercise and daily movement are simple steps to help your body stay healthy, which should help with the expression of your pain condition. Exercise builds muscles so they can better support key structures, and it helps pump healthy blood throughout your body, which delivers vitamins and nutrients to vital areas that can help with pain control. You don’t have to go through a rigorous workout at the gym to achieve these benefits either. Go swimming or take the dog for a walk, anything that will get you moving.

2. Consult With An Expert – Dr. Cohn has helped treat people in all walks of life facing all sorts of different pain conditions, and he can do the same for you. You don’t need to fight this battle alone. Consult with an expert who is truly interested in figuring out what’s going on and how to best treat it. The first step in treating a problem is making sure that you know exactly what you’re dealing with, and a pain management specialist can do just that. They can also help you pivot to new treatments if your original plan isn’t producing results.

3. Count Your Small Wins – Everyone wants to be completely pain free, but that rarely happens overnight. Because of this, you need to acknowledge small victories and partial progress as it comes along. Celebrating your progress can help make it easier to stick to a care plan or with a physical therapy program, and that can make it more likely that you’ll eventually reach your end goal of being pain free.

4. Develop A Support System – Chronic pain can leave you feeling alone and isolated from the world, so it’s important that you have a support system to fall back on when things get tough. Whether that’s friends, family, an online support group or your medical team, make sure you have someone you can talk to or vent to when things aren’t going the greatest, or when you want to talk about the big strides you’re making. A simple Google search for “chronic pain online support group” should yield plenty of promising results.

5. Take Can Of Your Mental Health – Far too often we focus on the physical toll that chronic pain is taking on us, and we can ignore another important aspect of our health – our mental health. Poor mental health or feelings of anxiety and depression can make it much harder to get control over your chronic pain condition. It can also make it harder for us to find the motivation to do what needs to be done to combat chronic pain, which only makes it harder to break out of this cycle. Don’t ignore your mental health when you’re addressing your pain condition.

If you can do these five things, we’re confident that you’ll move closer to independence from your chronic pain condition. And for more information or for help with your pain issue, reach out to Dr. Cohn’s office today.

New Chronic Pain Care Guidelines Recommend Ditching Medication

April 8, 2021 / Thomas Cohn, MD

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recently released some updated guidelines for how pain practitioners should help their patients deal with their chronic pain condition. The most notable suggestion is that NICE is advising doctors to avoid prescribing pain medication for a pain condition and instead believes they should recommend exercise or psychological therapy for the most effective treatment. For chronic pain sufferers who rely on pain medication as part of this treatment process, the news may cause anxiety and fear over whether or not they’ll have their access to these medications restricted.

We’re here to let you know that while these recommendations certainly have merit, no physician worth his salt is going to take medications away from someone who is using them responsibly and progressing in their rehab. In today’s blog, we take a closer look at the recommendations and explain how they’ll likely be implemented going forward.

Exercise Over Medication

If we just look at the headline and start to draw conclusions from there, it’s easy to get worked up over the latest recommendations. We’re here to help calm your fears and explain that although the recommendations are rooted in sound science, applying them unilaterally to a condition so unique as chronic pain is a terrible idea. Pain is unique to the individual, which is why there is no one-size-fits-all treatment for chronic pain. Even when two people are suffering from the same diagnosis, their treatment regimens may be different. That’s why we can’t just say that medications should never be used for effective pain care.

Nobody is saying that all you need to do to rid yourself of your chronic pain condition is to lace up your running shoes and go for a jog, but as we’ve talked about on the blog in the past, there is extensive research behind the idea that exercise and movement can be a key factor in helping fight back against a chronic pain condition. Exercise is an active solution that improves muscles, helps to control inflammation and works to stabilize joints that could be contributing to your pain issue. Medications, on the other hand, are a passive treatment that work to mask pain instead of treating the underlying issue. Medications alone will not cure your pain condition, but exercise and strength training or psychological therapy could.

With that said, painkillers and active treatment modalities can absolutely compliment one another, and this is when we’re all for prescribing medication to patients. If medication can make it easier for you to follow through on a physical therapy routine or to stick to your exercise program, then we’ll gladly walk you through a responsible painkiller management plan. We want to give patients all the tools they need to take control of their pain condition, and pain medications can certainly be part of that equation, so long as the patient is educated on their purpose and continues to prove that they can use the medication responsibly.

So in spite of the new recommendations, know that your pain physician will only recommend tapering off your medications if they aren’t actually promoting your recovery. If they aren’t doing any good and are putting you at a heightened risk for dependency or overdose, any good physician will adjust treatment to find a more effective method.

If you have been unable to find an effective solution for your pain, or you just want to talk to a physician who will take the time to get to know you and your diagnosis to provide the best level of care, reach out to Dr. Cohn’s office today.

Why The Pandemic Is Making Chronic Pain Worse For Most Patients

March 3, 2021 / Thomas Cohn, MD

There is little doubt that the pandemic has been hard on everyone. We’ve had to readjust to a new normal and find new ways to juggle our personal and professional lives. Everyone has been hit hard, but new research shows that it has been especially difficult for chronic pain patients. For many of them, their chronic pain condition has gotten worse during the pandemic.

Chronic Pain Worsening During The Pandemic

According to a new study, the majority of chronic pain patients have seen their chronic pain condition worsen throughout the course of the pandemic. For the study, researchers surveyed 502 chronic pain patients, with 88 percent of the group being females between 30 and 59 years old. More than 87 percent of patients had pain in more than one location, and the most common locations of pain were in the lower back, neck and abdomen. Participants were asked to complete online surveys about their condition and the pandemic to get an understanding of how their pain had changed since lockdowns began (This study took place in Spain, but the results likely mirror chronic pain here in the US).

According to the data, 70 percent of respondents said their chronic pain condition worsened in terms of severity, frequency of episodes or in how it interfered with their daily activities throughout the pandemic. Researchers also looked into why chronic pain frequency was on the rise during the pandemic. They surveyed respondents and came up with some of the most common stressors that could have a negative effect on a person’s chronic pain expression. Those factors include:

Job insecurity
Worries about the future
The number of people living in the same dwelling
Having someone close to them who died of COVID-19
Fear of becoming infected and its relation to their chronic pain condition

Additionally, the study found that some new pain triggers emerged from the pandemic. Prior to COVID-19, the most common new pain triggers were stress and weather changes. Now, patients cite an increase in triggers like sleep problems, negative thoughts, sadness, insufficient physical activity and fear of the contagion.

Finally, the study also shed light on how people are coping with chronic pain, and it’s not encouraging.

“The study has shown that since the state of emergency began, more than half of the patients have used rest to manage their pain, and a similar percentage have increased the consumption of medication. Both could have counterproductive effects,” explained Rubén Nieto, professor and researcher at the lab that conducted the study.

The pandemic has worsened chronic pain conditions for countless patients across the world, but it’s important that you don’t let the state of the world draw you into bad pain management habits. Now more than ever, it’s important that you get regular exercise, eat a healthy diet and pursue other active treatment methods instead of over-relying on passive techniques like rest and medication. This can be accomplished more easily with a pain physician by your side, so please don’t hesitate if you need assistance along the way. For more information or for help with your chronic pain condition, reach out to Dr. Cohn’s office today.

How Artificial Intelligence Could Replace The Pain Scale

February 4, 2021 / Thomas Cohn, MD

For anyone who has suffered from chronic pain or has been treated for a pain-related condition, you may remember being asked to rank your pain on a scale of 1-10. While this 10-point pain scale has become the standard for many pain management specialists across the US, it’s far from a perfect model.

Because unlike a blood pressure cuff that can give an objective result like 120 over 80, the 10-point pain scale is subjective in nature. What may feel like a 4 to one patient may be a 7 for another. For this reason, it’s often tough for pain specialists to gauge a person’s pain level and how to best help treat them.

However, artificial intelligence may soon be able to assist in how we quantify the subjective measure of pain. According to scientists at IBM and Boston Scientific, artificial intelligence may be able to capture pain sensation readings and allow them to be interpreted with a more objective model.

Artificial Intelligence And Chronic Pain

For their experiment, researchers used activity monitoring devices in order to capture and analyze biometric data that can correspond to the perception of pain. Researchers used biomarkers collected in clinical studies involving patients undergoing spinal cord stimulation. This included things like movement data, sleep data, heart rate levels and even voice recordings. Then artificial intelligence was employed to sift through all the results in hopes of identifying patterns that may allow a doctor to “read” a patient’s pain levels through data instead of using the 1-10 pain scale.

“We want to use all the tools of predictive analytics and get to the point where we can predict where people’s pain is going to be in the future, with enough time to give doctors the chance to intervene,” said Jeff Rogers, senior manager for digital health at IBM Research.

The research is still in its infancy, but scientists are encouraged by early results. However, it’s going to take tens of millions of data points in order to come up with anything close to resembling the readable pain scale they hope for. If all continues to go as hoped, researchers believe it could lead to the development of medical devices that can not only accurately forecast a person’s pain, but also spot the early signs of a flare up so patients can take steps to stay ahead of their pain. It’s a lofty goal, but it could be a gamechanger for millions of Americans who battle chronic pain on a daily basis. We’ll keep tabs on its progress over the coming months and years and provide any updates as they are released.