When we are being crushed under sever ongoing pain nothing comes easy. Every moment becomes a year. Every step becomes a mile. The perspective of time for a pain patient is different from others because waiting is not easy: waiting for an appointment with a specialist if the doctor agrees to make the referral to begin with, waiting for a proper diagnosis after waiting for multiple tests, waiting for different trials of treatments to take effect and waiting to be understood and believed by everyone around us when nothing seems to works. None of these steps are easy and nobody knows the difficulty of this journey other that pain patients.
Putting the goal of waiting in perspective may change things a little bit. In medicine we search for the root cause of a medical condition in order to get to the solution, this process does not work well with chronic pain sufferers. When you are suffering with excruciating pain every moment, it is not easy to wait.
On the other hand, killing the chronic pain is not possible either, nor is finding the exact root cause in many cases. If we set a different goal from the start and we learn about self management instead of waiting for the results of a test or hoping that medical visit with the specialist come sooner, we would start the journey of CHRONIC PAIN MANAGEMENT earlier in the road.
The concept of waiting would change if self management is incorporated earlier in the journey. We as Chronic pain patients can come back to Here and Now by learning about what can be done with awareness practices. We can learn how to become function centered in life instead of pain centered. We can get help right away if we learn about what can help our experience of life instead of only focusing on what can help the pain. Our function can improve if we learn how to degrade the pain from being the center of our existence.
It is the duty and responsibility of our doctors to learn about ways of self management and to convey this message to their patients. But it would only be effective if the patients take on the role of implementing these changes with an open mind and hope.
CHRONIC PAIN PATIENTS CAN’T WAIT. HEALING NEEDS TO START HERE AND NOW.
