September is Pain Awareness Month, and more than 51 million Americans report living with chronic pain.
Over the past couple of decades, experts say increased prescriptions of opioid medications were seen as a “quick fix,” but also led to widespread misuse.
When your back constantly hurts, you might think you know where the pain is originating. But you might also be wrong.
“All pain occurs in the brain. If your brain doesn’t decide you have pain, then you don’t have pain,” explained Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon at Grady Memorial Hospital.
Gupta said he by no means is diminishing the experience of those suffering pain, but he said humans can do almost anything within reason to the body and not have pain if their brain decides it’s not there.
On the other hand, he said, the brain can also create pain where it shouldn’t exist.
“People who don’t have limbs anymore, phantom limb pain, for example, how does that happen? How is the brain creating pain in a part of the body that doesn’t even exist? There’s a lesson in there, and that is that all pain is in the brain, which is an opportunity, I think, to try and control it,” Gupta said.
Gupta said the first step to managing chronic pain through your brain is to realize it often comes with baggage like depression, anxiety, poor sleep or loneliness.
“Pain is a truly mysterious biopsychosocial phenomenon. We don’t know how to measure it. We don’t know how to categorize it, but we know that it comes with all these things sort of intermingled,” Gupta explained.
To unlock the brain’s power of pain relief, Gupta said lifestyle changes might be in order, including an anti-inflammatory diet, using movement as medicine, meditation and prioritizing adequate, quality sleep.
“I think it’s hard for people to sort of wrap their heads around that sometimes because it makes sense. ‘Oh my shoulder is bothering me. It’s waking me up.’ But could it be that your poor sleep in the first place is causing your pain to get worse? I think that’s where the science is really heading,” Gupta said.