Tips For Managing Chronic Pain At The Lake

June 29, 2023 / Thomas Cohn, MD

The Fourth of July is only a few days away, and that means many people will soon be celebrating the holiday near one of Minnesota’s more than 10,000 lakes. Spending time by the water can be a great way to enjoy summer, but the lake can also cause issues if you’re dealing with an underlying chronic pain condition. We don’t want a chronic pain condition to cause problems for your Fourth of July holiday, so in today’s blog, we’re going to share some tips for managing your chronic pain condition if you’ll be on the lake this weekend.

Managing Chronic Pain On The Lake

Chronic pain is highly individualized, so there’s no guarantee that the following tips will be appropriate for your situation. That said, if you keep these tips in mind and are proactive in your approach, we’re confident that you’ll be able to keep your pain condition for causing problems at the lake.

1. Stay Hydrated – Dehydration can make movements harder for our muscles or joints, which can trigger an underlying pain condition. It’s easier to become dehydrated during the hot summer months, so always be sure to have drinkable water nearby. Also be sure to mix in plenty of water if you’re consuming alcoholic beverages, as alcohol can make it easier to become dehydrated.

2. Find The Shade – Overheating can also make a chronic pain condition more uncomfortable, so dress for the weather and find a shady spot to set up camp when you’re outside. Your body needs to appropriately regular its temperature, so stick to the shade, jump in the lake or head back into the air conditioning for a little bit if you’re starting to get hot and achy.

3. Don’t Be Afraid To Head Inside For A Bit – We understand that you want to be outside when the weather is nice, but the hot weather and the air pollutants from the Canadian wildfires can cause problems for sensitive groups. If your allergies are kicking up or you just feel like the hot weather is getting to you, don’t be afraid to head to an air conditioned room for a bit to help your body relax.

4. Get Healthy Sleep – You may want to stay up until nightfall to catch a fireworks show, but make sure that you get plenty of healthy, restful sleep. Regular sleep is essential for helping keep chronic pain at bay, and holiday weekends can throw off your sleep schedule. Try to go to bed and wake up around the same time each night, even over the 4th of July holiday stretch.

5. Use Sunscreen – Use plenty of sunscreen throughout the summer, because sunburn can make life a lot more uncomfortable, especially if this sensitivity triggers a flareup. Patients with CRPS and other conditions that can be triggered by skin irritation would be wise to be extra mindful about preventing sunburn.

6. Stay Active – Staying active can help improve your circulation and keep muscles functioning as they should. We know that you may want to kick back and relax over the Fourth, but don’t spend too much time sitting in a lawn chair by the lake. Still find time to exercise or at least be upright and active, and you can help to keep chronic pain symptoms at bay.

We hope that you have a wonderful time celebrating the Fourth of July, and we know that you can keep chronic pain at bay by staying hydrated, getting healthy sleep and begin cognizant of the sun and heat! For help with an individual chronic pain issue, or for answers to any questions you have, reach out to Dr. Cohn and his team today at (952) 738-4580.

How To Maintain An Active Lifestyle Despite Chronic Pain

June 2, 2023 / Thomas Cohn, MD

Chronic pain can make living an active life a little harder, but it’s certainly not impossible to stay active despite your chronic pain condition. In today’s blog, we share some tips for how you can work to maintain an active lifestyle even though you are managing a chronic pain condition.

Staying Active Despite Chronic Pain

It is important to remember that chronic pain is highly individualized, so it’s unlikely that all of these tips will work for every single patient hoping to stay active in spite of their chronic pain condition. That said, we’re confident that at least a couple of these tips can help you find it a little easier to stay active in the face of your pain condition. Here’s what we recommend.

1. Capitalize On The Good Days – Your pain and your mood can ebb and flow each day based on your symptoms, and you should never be ashamed to cancel plans or skip a workout if you’re dealing with a significant flareup. Conversely, you also want to pounce on an opportunity. If you’re having a good day, make the most of it. You don’t need to scale Mt. Everest or run a marathon simply because you are having a good day, but you should strive to be more active, because activity begets more activity. It may be easier to stack more good active days in a row if you take advantage of the time when your body can handle physical activity.

2. Know Your Limits – At the same time, it’s important to learn about your physical limits and to not overdo it during physical activity. If you’re taking on a new activity like hiking or cycling, don’t do too much at the beginning. Start slow and gradually build up your pace and your distance. Taking on too much physical activity can overstress your body and lead to injuries or worsening pain symptoms.

3. Utilize Ice And Heat – When you’ve returned home after your adventure, be sure to take care of your body with ice and heat. Ice packs can help to control swelling that may be more common in patients with certain chronic pain conditions, and hot packs or a warm bath can help to open up blood vessels and improve healthy blood flow throughout your body. See which methods help your body recover following periods of physical activity.

4. Strive For Healthy Sleep – Again, we know that it is easier said than done to tell a patient with a chronic pain condition that they could benefit from getting more quality sleep, but it really should become a point of emphasis if you want to pursue an active lifestyle. Restorative sleep ensures that we wake up ready to attack the day, and healthy sleep has been shown to help control pain sensitivity levels. Poor sleep can make us more sensitive to pain signals, which can only make it harder to get out and be active. Try to go to bed at the same time at night in a dark, distraction-free room, and you may find that you have more energy each morning.

5. Consistency Is Key – Finally, consistency is crucial when trying to maintain an active lifestyle with chronic pain. If you can gradually increase your activity levels and strive to always hit these goals each week, even in the face of chronic pain, it will be easier to always hit your activity targets and take on more physical tasks. It will take time and it won’t be easy, but forcing yourself to remain consistent in the short-term will make it easier to stay active in the long run.

If you focus on the above tips and connect with a pain specialist like Dr. Cohn for your individual pain care needs, we know that you can get back to living an active and independent lifestyle. For more information, or for help with your pain issue, give his office a call today at (952) 738-4580.

Brain Implants Are Helping To Decode Chronic Pain

May 26, 2023 / Thomas Cohn, MD

brain Chronic pain is one of the most common reasons why people visit a doctor’s office, but because of the highly individualized nature of chronic pain, figuring out a diagnosis and effective treatment plan isn’t always easy. It’s tough to really get inside the brain of a person who is battling a chronic pain condition, but that’s exactly what researchers tried to do with this most recent study.

To get a better understanding of chronic pain pathways, researchers implanted electrodes into the brains of four volunteers who were experiencing pain following an amputation (known as phantom limb pain). The participants went about their day as normal while the implants recorded activity in two specific brain regions where researchers believe pain responses occur – the anterior cingulate cortex and the orbitofrontal cortex. Patients were also asked to rate their pain levels on a standard scale several times a day over the course of six months, and when they would do this, they would also press a button that would cause the implants to record their brain signals for 30 seconds.

The captured information was then fed through a machine learning model that could find patterns in the data and predict each patient’s pain level based on the signals in their brain.

“From these models, we found that [electrical waves with] low frequencies in the orbitofrontal cortex corresponded with each of the patients’ subjective pain intensities, providing an objective measure of chronic pain,” said Prasad Shirvalker, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco and a co-author of the study, writes in the Conversation. “The larger the shift in low-frequency activity we measured, the more likely the patient was experiencing intense pain.”

Chronic Pain Brain Signals

Shirvalker went on to say that pain is highly individualized, but eventually they hope to decode unique pain signals to come up with patient-specific treatment plans.

“This is the first time ever chronic pain has been measured in the real world,” Shirvalkar tells the New York Times’ Priyanka Runwal. “Every patient actually had a different fingerprint for their pain.”

Researchers also wanted to better understand how the brain responded to painful stimuli, so they applied heat to each patient’s body to see how their brains reacted. They found that acute pain led to a more involved response from the anterior cingulate cortex. Because chronic pain involved a greater reaction from the orbitofrontal cortex, researchers say it’s the first time that there is direct evidence that chronic pain and acute pain involve different areas of the brain.

The data is extremely limited and was only collected on individuals who underwent amputation, but it is a step in the right direction for better understanding chronic pain and how our brains respond to these stimuli. Hopefully future research can continue to build on these findings and focus on more discoveries around the orbitofrontal cortex and its response to pain. The more we learn about how our brains react to chronic pain, the easier it will be to come up with targeted treatments.

In the meantime, if you need a more traditional approach to diagnosing and treating your chronic pain, reach out to Dr. Cohn and his team today at (952) 738-4580

Chronic Pain More Common Than Diabetes And Depression

May 19, 2023 / Thomas Cohn, MD

New data from the National Institutes of Health found that new cases of chronic pain are being reported at higher rates than diabetes, depression and high blood pressure.

The research, based on data from an annual survey form the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, surveyed adults on how often they experienced pain in the previous three months. In the survey, chronic pain was defined as having pain on most days or every day over that three-month period. The results were then compared to the responses of more than 10,000 respondents in 2019 and 2020. Researchers then worked to determine the rate of new cases that developed over that period using a metric called person-years, which took into account the number of people in the study and the amount of time between survey responses.

An analysis of the data found that new chronic pain cases were developing at an alarming rate. Researchers found that there 52 new cases of chronic pain per 1,000 person-years, which outpaced the rate of new cases of high blood pressure (45 new cases per 1,000 person-years). The chronic pain rate was also far higher than the new case rate of depression and diabetes. The team also noted that of those without any pain in 2019, 6.3 percent reported new chronic pain in 2020.

“What we’re finding is, to nobody’s surprise, we have an astounding problem of pre-existing chronic pain in this country and a huge amount of people who are developing chronic pain as each year goes by,” said Dr. Sean Mackey, chief of pain medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, who wasn’t involved in the research.

Concerning Data On Chronic Pain

High blood pressure is still more prevalent, but chronic pain is closing the gap as new cases outpace hypertension. Data shows that around 48 percent of adults had high blood pressure between 2017 and 2020, while 21 percent of the more than 10,000 surveyed adults reported chronic pain. That outpaces the 19 percent of U.S. adults with depression, and the rates of diabetes, heart disease and asthma, which all sit under 10 percent.

So while high blood pressure may still be a greater threat to the nation as a whole, the findings on chronic pain should be eye opening on a national level. It is great to see that this study is getting attention from large outlets like The New York Times, USA Today and NBC News, but covering the issue is only part of the puzzle. We also need to commit a lot more funding to treatment-focused studies. Understanding that chronic pain is a problem is helpful, but now that the national burden is under the spotlight, we need to put resources towards improving our understanding of how to best treat this highly individualized condition.

Another silver lining to take away from this study is the knowledge that if you are suffering from chronic pain, you certainly aren’t alone. More new cases are being diagnosed than many other serious conditions, and while that’s not great news in and of itself, it does mean that it should be easier to connect with others and with doctors who are familiar with your plight.

If you have questions about chronic pain or a condition that you’re battling, let us be a resource. Reach out to Dr. Cohn and his team today at (952) 738-4580.

Drinking To Cope With Chronic Pain May Lead To Worse Pain

April 28, 2023 / Thomas Cohn, MD

Alcohol has a number of effects on our brain and body, and while it may be able to seemingly drown out some pain sensations in a very short-term manner, it’s obvious that turning to alcohol is not a smart or healthy way to cope with your chronic pain condition. That sentiment only becomes more true on the heels of a new study that found that turning to alcohol to cope with chronic pain can actually lead to worsening pain sensations.

Chronic Pain And Alcohol Use

To get a better understanding of the effects of alcohol and pain perception, researchers turned their attention to three groups of mice. One group was dependent on alcohol (excessive drinkers), another had limited access to alcohol (moderate drinkers), and the final group had never been given alcohol. The mice then had their access to alcohol restricted before having it reintroduced.

Researchers found that in mice that were dependent on alcohol, allodynia was a common symptom during alcohol withdrawal. Allodynia is a condition in which a normally harmless nerve stimulus is perceived as painful by the brain. In other words, the mice going through withdrawals were more likely to experience phantom pain.

Interestingly when these mice were reintroduced to alcohol, pain sensitivity decreased, which would likely only continue to worsen a dependency issue. However, that decrease in pain sensitivity was not the same across the board. About half of the mice in the moderate groups showed signs of increased pain sensitivity during alcohol withdrawal, but they did not see pain sensitivity decrease when reintroduced to alcohol.

Additionally, when researchers measured the level of inflammatory proteins in the animals, they discovered that specific inflammatory molecules were only increased in dependent mice. This suggests that different molecular mechanisms may be driving the two types of pain, but on a positive note, it may make it easier to create medications that targets these specific proteins.

“These two types of pain vary greatly, which is why it is important to be able to distinguish between them and develop different ways to treat each type,” said study first author Vittoria Borgonetti, PhD, a postdoctoral associate at Scripps Research.

The team hopes that their findings and their future research will be make it easier for medical experts to help treat chronic pain conditions that are being fueled or worsened by alcohol.

“Our goal is to unveil new potential molecular targets that can be used to distinguish these types of pain and potentially be used in the future for the development of therapies,” said co-senior author Nicoletta Galeotti, PhD, associate professor of preclinical pharmacology at the University of Florence.

So not only is alcohol unhelpful at treating the underlying cause of chronic pain, it can actually increase your risk of phantom pain signals. Instead of turning to alcohol, turn to a pain care provider like Dr. Cohn. We’re confident we can find the right treatment option for your unique pain condition. For more information, or to set up an appointment with Dr. Cohn, give his office a call today at (952) 738-4580.