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About This Story
Matt, who has cerebral palsy, experiences constant pain. He is learning to "turn down" his pain by re-training his nervous system with hypnosis.
For more information on cerebral palsy, visit the site for United Cerebral Palsy.
About the Common Therapies List
The therapies listed in the orange sidebar are not necessarily meant to treat conditions directly. Often they are used to reduce stress, therefore increasing a person’s ability to cope and/or heal.
Discuss & Share Your Stories
Cerebral Palsy & Pain
Gary A. Walco, PhD
Hackensack University Medical Center
Excerpted from The New Medicine Interviews
About Cerebral Palsy
What happens with cerebral palsy… [is that] muscles go into states of contracture. They’re taut and frozen in certain positions. That puts a huge amount of pressure on different joints in his body.
Inhibiting Pain
Inhibiting pain responses was one of the things that sort of revolutionized our whole view of pain. …[For instance] If you’re talking about somebody who’s got an injury in a war circumstance, or an athlete who’s injured in playing… It may well be the case that an athlete who is so focused on the activity in which he or she is engaged, she can turn off, or ignore, to some degree, some of those pain stimuli. It’s only when you get a little time and distance from the immediate shock of the situation, , that the pain response overwhelmingly comes through.