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About This Story
A support group for rheumatoid arthritis talks about how they manage their pain and how meditation helps them cope.
For more information on chronic pain, visit the American Chronic Pain Association.
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
Listen to Your Body
Bettina Herbert, M.D.
Jefferson Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine
The body has a miraculous capacity to compensate after illness or
injury. It is only when it reaches the end of its ability to
accommodate that there may be pain. If one can lift off even a
little bit of the compensation, through gentle manual medicine,
biomechanical education and awareness, physical therapy, stress
reduction and nutritional support, there will often be a significant
reduction in pain. Starting to sense your body is key – then you will
realize you have a lot of control over how you're feeling.
Understanding Pain
Gary A. Walco, PhD
Hackensack University Medical Center
Excerpted from The New Medicine Interviews
Defining Chronic Pain
Acute pain and chronic pain really are not just quantitatively different; they’re qualitatively different. In times past, we would say, if you have pain for greater than three months, or greater than six months, it’s now “chronic pain.” But, people with chronic pain really have a significantly different experience than acute pain – how it affects their lives; what the pain experience is like. The implications are huge.
Integrative Medicine & Pain
Mimi Guarneri, MD, FACC
Scripps Integrative Medicine
Excerpted from New Medicine Interviews
How do I start doing things that are healthier? The problem here, in [America], for chronic disease is the eating; it’s the environment; and it’s how we’re living our lives. If we think that we can work from 7 in the morning to 10 at night; come home, and have a super-sized meal and go to sleep; and that that’s going to be conducive to health; then we’re only fooling ourselves.
Integrative medicine, to me, is the only multidisciplinary medicine that can bring a program to an individual and… handle all of these aspects. And that includes mind/body. Beautiful research done by John Kabat-Zin and others on mindfulness-based stress reduction [shows that] people in chronic pain [experience] decreased pain, decrease in anxiety... relaxation. I mean, whatever issue it is, you need to factor in what someone is eating, and how someone is living, mentally, and then what kind of environment they’re in.