. CNN)”Medicine is nothing more than a misguided miseducation in mortal misery.”
That’s not something you’d expect to hear from a doctor, especially one with the bona fides of Haider Warraich, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital physician and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
The “misguided miseducation” of Western medicine, he argues, stems from “turning persons into patients and healers into providers, and by separating the body from the mind, physical sensations from emotional states and pain from suffering.”
Warraich examines chronic pain in his new book, “The Song of Our Scars.”
The misery that Warraich investigates in his new book, “The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain,” is chronic pain, which affects an estimated 1 in 5 people worldwide, including Warraich. That’s about 1.5 billion people.
Longtime battles with debilitating back pain nearly thwarted his medical career. Today, he brings his experiences as both physician and patient to his examination of the nature and history of pain. Condemning modern medicine’s failures, he calls for a more holistic, interdisciplinary approach.
CNN: What is the biggest misconception people have about pain?
Dr. Haider Warraich: Almost everything we know about pain and how we treat it is wrong. Both patients and physicians have been taught that chronic pain is essentially acute pain prolonged.
But while acute pain rises up the spinal cord to the brain, chronic pain can often descend down from the brain, often without any trigger from below.
The fallacy that treatments for acute pain will work for chronic pain has, in part, led to the opioid epidemic and prevented people from treatments that might have given more relief.
Western medicine has tried to constrain pain to strictly physical sensations, based on the tools it has to address those. But pain is not purely physical.
CNN: What is pain, if not physical sensation?
Warraich: The science suggests what many patients know to be true: Pain is a combination of physical sensation, emotional trauma and memory. Brain imaging has revealed that the emotional brain is far more involved in the experience of chronic pain than acute pain. To the nervous system, chronic pain is most often akin to an emotion we feel in a part of our body.
By considering pain as a purely physical phenomenon, we limit treatments to pills and procedures, preventing people from getting the mental health interventions that are probably as, if not more, effective. The ideal approach to pain management is interdisciplinary.
CNN: What does that entail?
Warraich: The chief function of pain is to direct all your energies and attention to it by inducing fear that your body is under threat. For example, when I had terrible back pain, I worried that exercise might leave me paralyzed or that my spine might snap in half. Alternative modalities help us reframe how we think about pain. Alternative treatments such as cognitive therapy or physical rehab can help patients with chronic pain.
An interdisciplinary approach provides patients with access to different options, including cognitive therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, exercise, physical rehab and even hypnosis. Particularly effective is pain reprocessing therapy. Developed specifically for people in chronic pain, it helps to defang pain’s fear component.
The evidence supporting the effectiveness of alternative treatments like these is often more compelling than for many of the common procedures and prescriptions that we typically provide our patients.
CNN: With such strong science supporting alternative approaches, why have standard pain protocols remained so crude?
Warraich: One limiting factor is that doctors and nurses are highly unlikely to have lived with serious illness. They’re like chefs who have never tasted their own food. Based on our training as physicians, our thinking can wind up rigid.
Because some providers don’t take patients’ pain seriously, patients worry that the moment that they bring up their emotional state, their pain will instantly be dismissed.
Until physicians’ approaches shift, patients are going to struggle with accepting how closely linked things like mental health, depression, anxiety or history of previous trauma are to how much our bodies hurt. Recognizing that pain is, in fact, worsened by psychological factors makes it no less real.
“After thirty years of working with grievers, we have identified several other losses, including loss of trust, loss of safety, loss of control of ones body (physical or sexual abuse).
Society still does not recognize these losses as grief issues.
Loss of trust events are experienced by almost everyone and can have a major, lifelong negative impact.
You may have experienced a loss of trust in a parent, a loss of trust in God, or a loss of trust in any other relationship.
Is loss of trust a grief issue?
The answer is yes.
And the problem of dealing with the grief it causes remains the same grief is normal and natural, but we have been I’ll prepared to deal with it.
Grief is about a broken heart, not a broken brain.
All efforts to heal the heart with the head fail because the head is the wrong tool for the job.
It’s like trying paint with a hammer—it only makes a mess.” . .
. “Grief, I’ve learned, is just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
― Jamie Anderson . . This was a part of a post on a great blog I follow “Don’t Lose Hope”
I had a quick, emotional reaction (triggered). Four or five responses agreed that grief is just love with no place to go.
I am amazed, none of my childhood abuse and the grief that has followed me, has any connection to love.
We feel betrayal’s grief is love?
I feel the opposite, betrayal is closer to hate.
Is your PTSD grief just love with no place to go?
Now I see if we are grieving a friend maybe love with nowhere to go.
Two excerpts from “Meditation for the Love of it”:
“The work of meditation is to coax the mind into letting go of the perceptions and ideas that keep it stuck, so it can expand and reveal itself as it really is.
As vast creative Awareness. Pure light and ecstasy. An ocean of peace and power. The Self.”
.
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“One way you know you are experiencing the ego and not the Self is that the ego (ahamkara in Sanskrit) always experiences itself in comparison to others.
The ego never feels fully equal to others: it sees others as higher or lower, as better or worse, as friendly or potentially hostile.
The Self, on the other hand, just is.
The Self sees everything and everyone as equal to itself.”
PTSD - A Way Out.com 