This article was provided by the Sedona.com website.   Commentary by Utah Injury Attorney Rex Bush.

Webmaster’s note:  I have personally used this method to release negative emotions and have found it very helpful when dealing with nearly any aspect of life.  Negative emotions tend to block our progress everywhere in our lives and they make us sick.   Knowing how to spot and release these feelings is one of the most important skills a persona can have.

At some point in their lives, 80 percent of Americans — and some estimates say up to 90 percent — will experience back pain. It may be a dull ache, a sharp pain or a constant throbbing, and it can seriously interfere with your ability to function normally.

Not surprisingly, one nationwide phone survey of over 1,200 Americans, sponsored by Stanford University Medical Center, ABC News and USA Today, found that back pain was the most common type of pain reported (followed by knee and shoulder pain, joint pain and headaches.

While most back pain goes away in a few days, if your back pain lasts more than three months, a condition thought to impact about 10 percent of back-pain sufferers, it’s considered chronic. Treatments for such pain are estimated to cost about $26 billion a year.

What are the treatments? Well, typically they involve things like anti-inflammatory drugs, surgery, strengthening exercises, ice packs and heating pads. But it turns out that these treatments may be way off the mark because there is a major factor that’s been overlooked when it comes to chronic back pain: your mind.

“Most chronic back pain has a strong emotional component,” says Hale Dwoskin, CEO and director of training of Sedona Training Associates. “It is either emotionally driven or emotionally aggravated — or there is simply a lot of emotion because of having this pain in your back for so long.”

In fact, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes calls back pain “the second most common neurological ailment in the United States — only headache is more common.”

Further, numerous scientists and experts are regarding back pain as a disease of the nervous system, not of the spine. What is required to cure back pain, they say, is to overcome the negative emotions that are causing it.

Healing Back Pain: The Emotional Component

Quite simply, when people are given methods to deal with their negative emotions (which may rise due to the pain, or exist already), they often improve physically as well.

Take, for instance, a study published in Health Psychology and led by Robert Kerns, Ph.D., of the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. Researchers analyzed data from 22 trials of adults with chronic low back pain (who had been in pain for an average of 7.5 years), and found that psychological interventions improved pain better than standard treatments. Psychological interventions also improved:

* Health-related quality of life
* Work-related disability
* Interference of pain with daily living
* Depression

“Many patients with chronic back pain develop a sense of hopelessness,” says Kerns in Best Life magazine. “These [psychological] therapies show them that they can develop everyday strategies that make them feel better. I think one of the things that modern medicine has forgotten is that it’s important to treat the whole person, and this means addressing both the physical and psychological aspects of the pain. When it comes to back pain, just fixing a ‘broken’ body part often isn’t enough.”

Get Rid of Your Chronic Back Pain With The Sedona Method

The Sedona Method, a tool that teaches you how to release negative emotions, including those associated with physical pain, works to relieve back pain in two ways:

1. It reduces your underlying tension, stress and negative emotions
2. It helps you to naturally dissolve the feeling of back pain

Whenever you feel pain, you simply ask yourself the easy-to-learn questions that make up The Method. As you do so, you will begin to accept the pain, which is a crucial step toward ultimately releasing it.

This is because the more you dread, expect, or fear back pain, the more you will tend to manifest more of it. On the other hand, if you release these negative feelings, your body will be free to finally heal.

To read the story of one woman, Susan Benson, who overcame chronic back pain using The Sedona Method http://www.sedona.com/html/beyond-pain-management.aspx, be sure to read the inspiring article featured in Woman’s World magazine earlier this year.

Even though we make no claims to diagnose, treat or cure any specific ailment, over the last 25 years many of our graduates, such as Susan Benson, have reported back to us decided improvements in their pain levels — sometimes even miraculous improvement.

“When you release the stress and tension that is either causing your back pain or simply magnifying it, even long-standing pain in your back can easily dissolve,” Dwoskin says. “Either way you will feel a lot better emotionally, which usually translates to profound physical relief as well.”

Sources

Health Psychology. 2007 Jan Vol 26(1) 1-9

Best Life Magazine

Article provided by Rex Bush, webmaster of this blog’s affiliated website: Utah-Personal-Injury-Attorney.com. Click here Utah Injury Attorney to visit our home page and access other relevant articles on Utah injury law.

Whiplash is injury to neck bones, discs (a sort of “cushion” between the bones of the spine) and, most commonly, the supporting ligaments, tendons and muscles.  (the so-called “soft-tissues” of the neck)

Whiplash results from a sudden speeding up or slowing down, as in a car accident, when one is hit from behind or stops suddenly due to a front-end impact, and there is a violent backward and forward movement of the head.

Ligaments are like rubber bands that hold the bones in place.  Tendons connect muscle to bone.  Both can become weak or injured and may not heal back to their original condition.  This is because the blood supply to these parts is limited and healing is, therefore, slow and incomplete.   They also have many nerve endings causing pain where the ligaments are damaged or loose.

Hippocrates, an ancient Greek doctor known as “the Father of Medicine” cured this pain by plunging a red hot poker into the joint.

Few modern patients are willing to endure this cure and so, for a very long time, whiplash sufferers have had no real option–other than tasty and delightful painkiller drugs–to eliminate the pain.

According to the advocates of “prolotherapy” those days are gone.

Thanks to this simple and clever scientific breakthrough, whiplash sufferers now have hope for restoration of the soft tissues that support neck bones.

Prolotherapy is injection of sugar water into the soft-tissues of the neck.   The resulting inflammation increases blood supply and nutrient flow that stimulates the tissue to repair itself.

Prolotherapy is short for proliferative injection therapy.   Proliferative refers to the tendency of the soft tissues to “proliferate” i.e. increase,  with the treatment.

According to doctors who believe in this treatment, some patients many only need a few treatments while others many need 10 or more.  The average number of treatments is reported to be 4-6.

I’m a personal injury lawyer and have had only one client undergo these treatments.   He was very happy with the increased stability and decreased pain in his neck that he attributed to the treatment.

Doctors who favor this treatment believe it can be used to cure other ailments such as carpal tunnel syndrome, TMJ and fibromyalgia.  For a list of these see http://www.prolotherapy.com/prolohelp.htm.

Useful info on this subject is found at http://www.prolotherapy.com/

For more information here is an article from Practical PAIN MANAGEMENT, January/February 20  ppm2007

For views from those who question the efficacy of this treatment see http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/prolo.html

For Utah residents, prolotherapy is delivered at the Docere Clinics, 2188 S. Highland Drive, Suite 210, Salt Lake City, Utah,  84106  801.582.3260.

Be sure to consult your personal doctor about whether prolotherapy is right for you.