pain

Four Last-Minute Gifts For The Chronic Pain Warrior In Your Life

/ Thomas Cohn, MD

chronic pain giftIf you know someone with a chronic pain condition, you’re probably aware that the thing they want most for Christmas is to be free of their chronic pain condition. While you may not be able to rid them of their pain, there are a number of gifts you can give to that chronic pain warrior in your life that they’ll appreciate. In today’s blog, we share four last-minute gifts that will be great for someone in your life who is battling a chronic pain condition.

Gifts For Chronic Pain Warriors

Most of the items on this list aren’t tangible items, but for the chronic pain warrior in your life, it will be wonderful to receive any of these things this holiday season.

1.  A Phone Call – Chronic pain can be extremely isolating, and sometimes that can leave a person feeling disconnected from the world around them. They may feel like their friends have forgotten about them or that they don’t care. This is obviously untrue, but you can help change this perception by calling them up on a regular basis. Call to check in and catch up once a week or a couple times a month. Reaching out is one of the best gifts you can give to someone who is feeling isolated by pain.

2. A Friend Who Listens – Sometimes, all a person wants is a shoulder to cry on or an ear to vent to. Be that person for the chronic pain warrior in your life. Do more listening than you do talking, because that can be cathartic for the person with chronic pain.

3. A (Cancellable) Date – Nobody likes to cancel plans, and that’s especially true for people who need to cancel because of their chronic pain condition. Make plans with them that can be easily adjusted in the event of a flare-up. Instead of getting tickets to play or a movie at a specific date and time, get a gift card or treat them to a night out on the town when they are up to it. Plans with a friend is a great gift idea, just try to make them flexible to account for chronic pain.

4. Books And Brainteasers – If your friend can’t be as active as they’d like because of their pain condition, challenge their mind with a new book or brainteasers like puzzles or word searches. These brain-engaging activities can also serve to draw attention away from pain, making their pain condition less noticeable.

And if your friend or family member really wants to overcome their chronic pain condition in the new year, ask if they’d consider syncing up with a pain management specialist like Dr. Cohn. We’d be happy to set them up with an individualized treatment plan based on their specific needs. For more information, or for help with a pain condition, reach out to Dr. Cohn and his team today at (952) 738-4580.

What To Do When Chronic Pain Becomes Too Much

/ Thomas Cohn, MD

chronic painOftentimes the message in the chronic pain community is to keep your head down, count your small wins and never let chronic pain become overwhelming. Those are great sentiments to strive for, but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy to persevere in the face of a chronic pain condition. Some days, you chronic pain can simply be too much. In today’s blog, we explain what to do on those days when your chronic pain condition becomes too much to handle.

When Chronic Pain Overwhelms

A chronic pain condition can easily become overwhelming, but this isn’t an indictment on how you handle pain. Nobody knows exactly what you’re going through, and combined with everything else you have going on in your life, it can be easy to become overwhelmed for a bit by your physical condition. However, it’s important that you understand how to best respond in these situations. Here’s some advice for overcoming overwhelming chronic pain.

1. Take Some “Me” Time – Don’t just continue to try to push through the pain, because that’s going to be exhausting for your physical and mental health. Instead, lay down and relax. We know even relaxing can be difficult if you have chronic pain, but it’s important to try to destress and destimulate your body. Go into your bedroom, turn off the electronics, and get some much needed rest. You’ll need it to tackle your pain condition head on in a bit.

2. Talk With Someone – Talking with someone about your feelings can go a long way in helping you find more control in the situation. Even though you may feel helpless, talking about your frustrations can be a cathartic experience, regardless of whether or not the person you are talking to is trying to find solutions to your pain. Talking with a parent, a friend or a doctor about your experience can help make it easier to overcome.

3. Exercise – We know that “exercise” oftentimes gets cast as this catch-all solution for chronic pain, but there are a number of studies that show a positive correlation between exercise and things like mood or pain perception. We know that the last thing you want to do when chronic pain feels overwhelming is to go to the gym and put in an intense workout, so find a different way to exercise and keep moving. Go for a walk, do some yoga or head to the swimming pool and swim some laps in the warm water. Movement is helpful in controlling the physical and mental expression of chronic pain.

4. Eat Healthy – You can’t control every aspect of you body, but one thing you have total control over is what you put in it. Choose healthy food options, and it can help to calm inflammation that may be triggering a flare-up. If you choose unhealthy options, inflammation could persist and you could gain weight that could further complicate a joint or muscle issue.

5. Connect With A Specialist – Finally, if your current chronic pain treatment simply isn’t working, sync up with a pain management specialist like Dr. Cohn. He’ll conduct a comprehensive diagnosis, develop a variety of treatment options and he won’t stop until he finds a solution for you. You don’t have to try and overcome your pain condition alone. Let our team put our decades of experience to work for you.

For help with your chronic pain issue, reach out to Dr. Cohn’s office today at (952) 738-4580.

What Chronic Pain Does To Your Demeanor

/ Thomas Cohn, MD

demeanorWe always try to provide each and every patient with the highest level of care, but every once in a while someone feels that we let them down for one reason or another. We always try to rectify the problem, because we never want a patient to feel abandoned if they had an issue. Recently, a patient left a review stating that we should research “what chronic pain does to your demeanor.”

Chronic pain is extremely complex and affects everyone differently, but one thing we feel that we understand way better than the average person is how chronic pain affects a person’s demeanor. Each day we’re helping patients navigate the physical and mental challenges presented by their chronic pain condition, and as we’ve documented on the blog in the past, we’ve also dealt with chronic pain personally. Again, all pain is different, but we’re certainly no stranger to how chronic pain can weigh heavy on a person and lead to personality or mood changes.

In an effort to help reach out to the person who left the review, and to shine a light on a problem that is oftentimes overlooked, we thought we’d devote a whole blog to better understanding how chronic pain can affect a person’s demeanor.

Chronic Pain And Your Demeanor

Chronic pain can affect your demeanor in a number of ways. If you’re constantly in physical pain, or you’re avoiding certain activities because they could cause pain, it’s going to have an affect on your psyche. It’s completely reasonable and even expected for chronic pain patients to be at a heightened risk for things like:

  • Irritability
  • Depression
  • Anxiety
  • Lack of motivation
  • Mood swings
  • Worry
  • Short temper

The physical reason behind this is rather obvious. It’s not fun to constantly be in pain or in fear of pain, and that constant threat of pain can leave us in a sour mood. But pain also has a significant affect on the brain. Pain can disrupt normal brain cell communication and foster increased feelings of doubt, worry or anxiety. Moreover, the stress from dealing with a chronic pain condition can lead to bio-mechanical changes in the prefrontal cortex, which is the area of the brain that helps to regulate emotions. In other words, things are happening behind the scenes that actually affect how your brain regulates emotion.

So it’s not just that pain is making you more irritable because you’re physically uncomfortable, changes in how your brain communicates and the chemicals it produces can actually lead to changes in your demeanor. And while that can be scary, the fact that we understand this relationship is helpful in how we work to effectively treat it. Treating chronic pain isn’t just about healing the physical injury, it’s also about carefully managing the brain and working to improve cell communication to help reduce stress and the impact the physical pain is having on your entire body.

The biggest obstacle to effectively treating the totality of a chronic pain condition is how unique pain is to an individual. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution that will take care of a person’s body and mind. That’s also why chronic pain is rarely solved in just one visit. The provider really needs to understand the patient in order to address all aspects of their condition that are affecting their health. The process can be frustrating at times, but we know that you’ll come out better for it because we’ll be working to treat the physical, mental and emotional aspects of chronic pain.

We may not fully understand how chronic pain has affected your demeanor, but trust us when we say that we want to learn how it has and help to develop solutions to get both your mind and body back to a healthy place. If you’re having any mental or physical issues relating to your chronic pain condition, please reach out. We’ll do everything we can to find an individualized solution to your issue. For more information, give our team a call today at (952) 738-4580.

The Importance Of Overcoming The Fear Of Your Chronic Pain Condition

/ Thomas Cohn, MD

fear chronic painAn aversion to pain is natural, and it’s not uncommon for a person to be afraid of pain, which can be both good and bad. Fearing pain can lead us to make smart decisions to avoid potentially painful activities, but it can also work against us if we’re so afraid of pain that it leads us to make choices that end up compounding pain. It may sound a bit confusing, but let us explain.

If you wake up and are afraid of your pain condition, you may opt to stay in bed and avoid physical activity that could help you break out of your cycle of pain. It can lead you to want to stay in bed, order unhealthy take-out and do nothing positive for your health the whole day. When you let the fear of your chronic pain condition dictate your day, it makes it harder and harder to develop healthy habits that can actually help you overcome your condition. You can work towards improving your condition, or you can make it worse, but you can’t let fear lead you down the wrong path.

Let Fear Fuel You

Instead of letting fear keep you inactive, let it fuel you to make positive changes in your life. Know that if you don’t do anything to help yourself get better, there’s a very good chance that your condition will get worse, so let that knowledge motivate you to make positive changes in your life.

These changes don’t need to take place overnight, either. Strive for a few “wins” each day, and build on them. Go for a one mile walk in the afternoon, have some vegetables for a snack, and do an extra round of your physical therapy exercises. Write down some of the positive things you did for your health each day, and challenge yourself to build on those goals as time goes on. Small steps can lead to big changes over time, you just need to be patient and challenge yourself  to do right by your body.

You don’t need to live in fear of your chronic pain, but it pays to be knowledgeable about how your chronic pain can continue to worsen if you do nothing about it. Other than making some simple changes in your life to be more active and eat healthier, it’s also imperative that you sync up with a pain management specialist like Dr. Cohn. He’ll be able to get to the bottom of your condition, explain what’s going on, and provide you with some direction to keep working towards your ultimate goal of helping you rid yourself of your pain condition.

So while fear of pain can motivate you, don’t let it force you into bad habits that increase your likelihood of future pain. To break out of the cycle and overcome your pain, reach out to Dr. Cohn’s office today.

What Women Want – A Pain Care Provider Who Believes Them

/ Thomas Cohn, MD

chronic pain womenChronic pain can be an extremely challenging to overcome, and that sentiment rings even truer when patients don’t feel like they are being heard by their treating physician. And according to recent statistics, oftentimes it is women that feel like their voices aren’t being heard in their quest to effectively treat their chronic pain.

Several studies have used a mechanism called GREP, which stands for Gender Role Expectation of Pain measure, to better understand some of the discrepancies that women face when attempting to have their pain treated. Some of the studies on GREP have found that women are viewed as being more likely to report pain, faster to report pain and more sensitive to report pain, and that can have a negative effect in how they are treated by their physician and the healthcare community in general.

Some other common complaints about how men and women are viewed when it comes to pain care include:

  • Women complain more than men
  • Women are not accurate reporters of their pain
  • Men are more stoic than women, so when they complain of pain, “it’s real”
  • Women are better able to tolerate pain than men
  • Women are seen as more sensitive or dramatic, so their pain is more likely to be viewed as an overreaction than a debilitating reality

All of these ideas work against women in their quest to treat their chronic pain condition, and these implicit biases can be present in pain care providers who generalize chronic pain.

Being Heard By Your Pain Care Specialist

That’s why it’s so important to find a pain care specialist who will really take the time to get to the bottom of your pain, to listen to your concerns and to work with you to develop an individualized care plan and see it through. We do that with every patient that comes into our office, and while it takes a little more time and effort, we know that part of the battle when it comes to chronic pain is simply being listened to.

Pain is so complex and unique that it requires an individualized approach for every patient. Any doctor that simply rushes to prescribe opioids may only be putting a Band-Aid on the problem. That may provide some short-term relief, but it won’t do anything to cure the issue on a larger scale. We know that this process is time consuming and may require us to adapt and overcome new challenges, but we’ve seen it work firsthand, and that’s what we want to offer all of our patients.

So if you feel like your concerns aren’t being heard, or if you feel like your doctor isn’t really taking your input to heart, maybe it’s time that you find a specialist who puts you first. Dr. Cohn and his team have been doing that for patients for decades, and we’d love to add your name to the growing list of patients who have found chronic pain relief with our assistance. For more information, contact our clinic today.