Reddit reviews Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief

Yes, I have experienced this as well. One of the techniques used (https://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-Meditation-Pain-Relief-Kabat-Zinn/dp/1591797403) tells you to focus on your pain and isolate it. This also had the side effect of bringing your pain into focus. If you have been distracted enough to keep the pain out of your mind, the mindfulness brings it right back into focus!


Here are reviews of the research for using this with Chronic Pain
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5368208/
http://bjgp.org/content/65/635/e387?utm_source=TrendMD&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Br_J_Gen_Pract_TrendMD_1
Results:

> We found low-quality evidence that mindfulness meditation is associated with a small decrease in pain compared with all types of controls in 30 RCTs.

and

> Conclusion There is limited evidence for effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions for patients with chronic pain.


AKA - its "slightly" better than a placebo

There is also some interesting work recently questioning the long-term effectiveness of CBT and other techniques: https://behavior.net/2015/08/is-the-effectiveness-of-cbt-fading/

This guy is the king of mindfulness meditation for pain management. He also has some vids on YouTube.

https://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-Meditation-Pain-Relief-Kabat-Zinn/dp/1591797403

Hi macshaggy, I'm sorry to hear that you are in so much pain, and especially that it seems that it is a pretty dominant aspect of your daily experience. Fortunately, I think your experience with mindfulness meditation may be a very strong tool for you to make this situation much better. A fair amount of research has been come out over the last few decades showing that mindfulness meditation can decrease both the feeling of pain and the negative emotional effects that come with it.

It sounds contradictory at first, but I have been taught by a number of meditation teachers and experienced myself that being mindful of the body, and even the specific place where you feel pain emanating from, actually reduces the sensation of pain by (1) giving yourself a more spacious sense of the body that is not simply dominated by pain, (2) allowing yourself to experience pain not as an invasive "object" in the body, but actually as a varying sensation that are easier to manage, and (3) allowing yourself to "decouple" the raw experience of pain from all the negative emotions and thoughts that often come along with it.

All of this is explained a lot better here.

I would recommend looking into Jon Kabat-Zinn's work. He really pioneered the idea of using mindfulness meditation to help with pain management. He has a set of guided meditations called Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief: Guided Practices for Reclaiming Your Body and Your Life. You may also be interested in his book Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, which has attained almost legendary status in this area.

I hope you feel better soon! If you have any questions feel free to ask me. This is not really my area of expertise but I have a bit of knowledge in the area.

I'm afraid I have absolutely no idea at all about the pharmaceuticals; sorry.

That said, have you considered mindfulness? Yes, yes, new-age hippy meditation blahblahblah ... However:

WebMD: Meditation May Reduce Pain: Brain Imaging Shows Impact of Brief Mindfulness Meditation Training

Health.com: How Meditation Releases and Relieves Pain

News-Medical.net: Study shows mindfulness-oriented intervention may reduce chronic pain in adults

Quoting from the first article:

> After just four, 20-minute instructional sessions in mindfulness meditation, most participants in the small study experienced big reductions in pain intensity and unpleasantness when subjected to painful stimuli.

> Prior to learning the meditation technique, brain imaging showed significant activity in a key area of the brain when the participants were subjected to intense heat, but this activity was reduced when they were meditating.

> “This is the first study to show that only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation,” said researcher Fadel Zeidan, PhD, who is a postdoctoral fellow at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

If you're interested in trying mindfulness, you can check whether there are classes in your local area; in my area, they're available in those "adult education classes" at the local community college (along with computer basics, knitting, and managing diabetes); the local university's community mental health program; and alternative therapy centers.

Or you could try Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief: Guided Practices for Reclaiming Your Body and Your Life.

Even if you're sceptical about the whole thing, it's maybe $50 for the community college classes, $15 for the audiobook.

I hope you can find relief!

If you're in pain then pain medication is appropriate treatment. Lots of options there too.

As far as dealing with the pain I am a big fan of physical therapy and exercise. It can take a very long time but you can build back up. It's not simply about strength either, you need to build endurance and flexibility. Something as simple as a walking program can go a long way to making you feel better. I have 2 bum knees and 1 bum leg and walking helped me a lot. Recently re injured the bum knee and the ortho said I won't need a knee replacement for at least another 10 years. Original injury was in 1969! Had extensive surgery back in 1978. Have done tons of PT, walking, swimming, even walking in the pool. I did yoga to recover from surgery. I started doing yoga again a year ago.

To deal with the mental angst try mindfulness meditation. Jon Kabat-Zinn has a very good program. You can read his books or your local hospital may offer a course in it. https://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-Meditation-Pain-Relief-Kabat-Zinn/dp/1591797403

And as you can imagine I have been thru a lot of pain. A LOT. Like 11 on a scale of 1-10. I have had severe pain for years at a time. And back then they didn't even have Advil. Aspirin or Tylenol was what you got. They didn't want to give you opiates because they were scared of turning you into an addict. And NSAIDs don't do anything for me. Constant pain does wear you down. It's horrible. You feel like someone is raking a broken clamshell over your last nerve.

Antidepressants can be very good for chronic nerve pain. They worked like a charm for me. Took about 6 months and then no more pain. It was amazing. There's GABA, there's Lyrica, there are other drugs, there are other modalities.


You're less than a year into this. It can take 2-3 years to feel good again. You may find your bones still occasionally ache in years to come, but even that goes away with time.

These conditions are outside of the scope of my knowledge, so there's not much else that I can say. There's a link to some free classes at the top of this subreddit which you might want to try out. There was also a discussion of fibromyalgia here a few days ago, so you might want to check it out.

There are specific forms of meditation that are well suited for pain relief. This is something I've used, so you might want to look for something similar.

Beyond that, whatever you wind up doing just be very mindful of your body and do not be hesitant to avoid things which cause you pain, or to seek modifications for them so that you can continue doing the work in a manner that's comfortable.

Here are some:
http://psychcentral.com/lib/2013/using-mindfulness-to-approach-chronic-pain/
http://www.bemindful.org/kabatzinnart.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-Solution-Pain-Step-Step/dp/1572245816
http://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-Meditation-Pain-Relief-Reclaiming/dp/1591797403

My only reservation with this technique is that part of me doesn't want to accept that I just have to accept the pain for now, as I still want to find a 'cure'. With my particular problem (degenerative disc disease) there are 2 components: mechanical pain and central sensitisation. The mechanical pain comes from my bones and muscles and tendons not working properly and getting tight/weak/obnoxious. The central sensitisation (where the brain changes in response to long term pain, making the pain more severe, spreading the area of pain and causing pain to normal touch and non painful stimuli) is the part that I feel can respond to things like mindfulness. At the same time I can continue to have physiotherapy and do pilates, etc to work out the issues with the mechanical component.
tl;dr: just because you're still looking/hoping/working for a cure or effective treatment doesn't mean you can't 'wind down' the emotional aspects of pain and try to calm your brain down so you can study!

I recommend this: http://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-Meditation-Pain-Relief-Reclaiming/dp/1591797403/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1409327503&sr=1-1&keywords=jon+kabat+zinn+chronic+pain

Or, guided meditations generally.