Thursday 29 July 2010

Feeling Returned to Numb Areas

One side-affect linked to long-term pain can be numbness in toes or fingers, depending on the condition.

Last week a guy came to us with extreme back pain and he also said that this had affected his toes which were numb. Within minutes we had cleared the back pain but the numbness remained.

We tried the same technique but this time concentrated just on returning the feeling to the numb toes, this worked instantly.

The nature of this form of therapy is to produce a biological effect instantly. It is likely that the numbness would have returned in its own time, yet with the power of the mind you don't need time as a healer.

Tuesday 27 July 2010

'Pain Memory' Cured in Minutes

Two weeks ago I was contacted by a young lady who is a goalkeeper for a London Premiership Football (Soccer) team.

Her problem started last season where she sustained an ankle sprain. She saw her local doctors who correctly diagnosed the injury and also had access to the mens team's physios who helped with the recovery.

Although the sprain healed she was still getting some discomfort whilst playing football, yet managed to finish the season but had to miss vital training sessions to let the ankle recover after each game.

She felt absolutely no pain at all when walking, so during the close of the season she had come to the conclusion that the injury had finally recovered. That was until their first pre-season training session at the beginning of this month. After only a few minutes of jogging she had extreme pain and had to sit out the rest of the training session.

This was obviously worrying for her, having the pain reoccur so soon after starting training she was very concerned as to whether she would be able to play football this coming season.

She revisited the doctors who confirmed that this was the after effects of her previous injury and arranged for a physio appointment. This process usually takes around 6 weeks to get an appointment. She had already explained that she had access to the teams physio and they weren't able to help.

She attended the second training session where she was unable to train and was told by the team coaches and manager that she should really not be walking or to use crutches until she could get the ankle properly healed.

I was contacted at this stage as her parents didn't know what to do. Having heard the history of the injury and pain it seemed appropriate to clear any 'Pain Memory'.

The process for clearing 'Pain Memory' is quite straight forward and only takes a couple of minutes. We ran through the process and looked at some exercises to mimic running. She completed these without any discomfort so she went for a run. Well, even I was suprised that no further pain relief was required, she had felt no discomfort at all.

I heard back from them over the weekend, she has completed all her training sessions since without any sign of pain. The coaches and managers at the club were surprised to see her, one minute they're advising her to put no pressure on her foot and a few days later she was back in full training. The parents were also pleased to hear that she may be promoted to a higher team within the club as her footballing has improved since she was able to train properly for the first time in months.

This is a classic case of 'Pain Memory', but what is more worrying are the amounts of people who have the same condition. Imagine if this young lady had not cleared the pain, the likelihood is she would have had trouble with her ankle possibly for life. Once that pain has been reinforced in the mind, it can only be cleared by the mind. No amount of physio, ankle strapping is going to help, what it will do is reinforce the belief that there is something wrong with the ankle and it hurts!

Mind and Body Communication

Although this isn't directly related to pain relief it does highlight how our mind and body communicate in different ways.

Obviously we have our nervous system but there's a clue about a different way they communicate. When we go to sleep at night our mind initiates sleep paralysis to stop us acting out our dreams. But prior to initiating sleep paralysis our brain must make sure that we are actually asleep. What it does is send a signal to roll over, if we then carry out that command it will wait a while and then resend the same message. This is where the term 'tossing and turning' comes from when someone is unable to get to sleep. They are receiving that urge to turn over from the brain, to check that the body has gone to sleep.

Once we ignore the urge to turn over the brain then sends other signals to double check that we are truly asleep. It sends pain signals! If we ignore those pain signals then it is satisfied that we are asleep and sleep paralysis will be 'turned on', but it does send quite ferocious pain.

Try this out, when you go to bed ignore that 'urge' to turn over and just lay still. It won't be long before you start getting some really uncomfortable feelings and pain.

So the moral to this is, if we can identify how to effectively communicate with our brain, we can talk in its language and have it do what we want. Ultimately we want it to stop the pain NOW, and it does - within seconds!

What is PAIN?

Ok, now we've got the introduction out of the way we need to explore exactly what pain is.

Pain isn't necessarily a negative experience. Its first job is to warn us that an injury has taken place, so the first thing to do is get it checked out by the doctor. Secondly pain is there to stop us doing any further damage whilst the injury heals. Ok, so once the injury has healed the pain should stop.

Most of the time this is the case, but ocassionally the pain remains, or comes back although no further injury takes place. So let's explore a little further about pain.

Pain is a subjective experience. It is created in the brain and we only have the impression that the pain is felt in an area where the injury has taken place. It has to do this in order to protect the area whilst the healing process takes place. Evidence of pain being subjective is: differing thresholds of pain from individual to individual and also pain felt in 'Phantom Limb Pain' (PLP) cases. Another phenomenon recognised by conventional healthcare is 'Pain memory', muscles can store the memory of pain. As we're already aware pain is just an illusion created by the brain so the memory MUST be in the brain and not the muscle.

Of course, not all pain is derived from an individual injury. Pain can be felt through disease so we'll take a look at Arthritis. Here pain can be felt through inflammation, damage to joint tissue, fatigue and stress. With ongoing pain the nerves tend to get into a routine of sending those pain signals, or more to the point the brain expects there to be pain. This can be likened to 'Pain Memory' and can last for years. I have no doubt that a large percentage of Arthritis pain sufferers are doing so unnecessarily.

Introduction

For many years now I have been using pain relief techniques which have proven extremely effective.

I remember on one ocassion when I first started using one particular technique. It was around 14 years ago when my daughter fell and knocked herself out. She was 4 years old at the time and had a gash on her chin which needed medical attention. I used this psychological analgesia technique which took just a few seconds, the pain stopped instantly, she stopped crying and we set off to the hospital.

She was fine but needed some steri-strips to seal up the gash. I remember the nurse talking to my daughter and saying that she needed to put on some 'glue' to hold the strips in place but it would hurt. The nurse put on the 'glue' and then the strips and she asked my daughter if it hurt? To which she replied 'no'. The nurse said I knew it would! Strange how the nurse just expected my daughter to agree that it hurt when in fact she said that it hadn't.

It was this event that change the way I viewed pain and realised how effective our brains are at controlling our bodies.

This is just one example of the many astounding pain relief stories I can tell you but it seems appropriate to start off with an early experience.

I will be exploring the possibility of sharing some of these techniques with those that suffer from chronic pain. Although I usually only practice these techniques within my local area it seems with two-way online communication becoming easier, I may be able to help people who don't have access to similar help.