Exercise: Create a Set of Exercise Possibilities
Exercise: Identify and Set Your Boundary
Exercise: Analyze Your Resource Spending
Concentration and Cognitive Abilities
Consistency, Goals, and Giving Up
Strength Euphoria and Setbacks
Exercise: Long-Term Mental Health Management
Exercise: Connect with Your Pharmacist
Exercise: Simple Meditation Practices
Retraining Your Nervous System
Exercise: Clearly Observe Your Own System
Exercise: Find a Support Group
Exercise: Prioritize Your Future
Who Wants a Paint-by-Numbers Life Anyway?
I was in the middle of a career as an anesthesiologist at a university teaching hospital in southwestern Ontario when I decided to go back to school. I wanted to learn more about chronic pain. I had been an obstetric anesthesiologist, relieving labor pain, and had also dealt with post-surgical pain in recovery and on the surgical floors. Surgical pain is acute pain. Doctors and nurses expect, understand, and know how to deal with acute pain. Usually what works for one patient after a certain surgery will work well to treat others after a similar surgery, with minor variations. But the world of chronic pain is very different, one problem being that what works for one person with a chronic pain condition might not work at all for someone with the same diagnosis. And the patient’s life situation, mood, and past experience with pain are important in working toward pain control.
When I first started working in chronic pain clinics, I was struck by the lack of knowledge, scarcity of research, and general misconceptions around the condition of chronic pain. Here was a problem that one in five people in the United States and Canada suffer from, yet doctors-to-be received almost no training in it at any time in their undergraduate or postgraduate years.
Different medical specialties often held opposing views on how to assess and treat chronic pain. How could a patient experiencing the confusion, fatigue, and life-changing experience of chronic pain make sense of their problem if even their doctors couldn’t? It is so multi-faceted and affects virtually every aspect of life, work, and relationships. Collaborative multi-disciplinary care for the patient, and education for the providers, seemed to make the most sense. Different approaches will appeal to different people.
Doctors do not come off well in Taming Chronic Pain, this recounting of author Amy Orr’s journey of discovering how to live well with her chronic pain. I am happy to say that, in the past ten years, education in pain management has become mandatory in most Canadian and American medical schools. There is even a path to certification in the specialty of Pain Medicine now in Canada, as well as several other countries. In the future, I hope that patients reporting ongoing pain to their doctor will meet with fewer confused looks, and more understanding, than Amy did in her medical journey.
I was very pleased to be invited to write the foreword for this book.