The Painful Truth: The new science of why we hurt and how we can heal

Product Information

Another approach is to accept the pain we feel by becoming a non-judgmental observer - instead of trying to control or defeat it. This can be done through mindfulness. This might sound like madness but I have tried it and have felt it works. All pain manifests itself in the brain, and the brain can change the physical behaviour of your body. Think fight or flight, where fear response can cause eyes to dilate, veins to contract (so we might bleed less if cut), the heart to beat faster so that we can either fight or run faster than without it. Sadness can manifest itself with the physical manifestation of wet tears from our eyes.

Persistent pain once it occurs due to an actual physical injury, the brain then becomes overly sensitive to new forms of pain occurring and if something twinges and it stops actually manifesting through response to pain and begins to manifest pain that isn't real and just triggers off something like a sensory alarm going off - similar to how some people respond who might have had their house broken into and things stolen. They just become too sensitive to the threat of it occurring again. The mind manifestation can change physical response and that's not just in tears when sad but also on the flight and flight response where the whole body will alter into a completely different physiological response. This includes changes to a blood system, our eyes dilate, and we have the ability to reduce the amount of blood that might be released if we are bleeding. Durerea nu este în corp, dar nici nu se găsește doar în minte: durerea este în persoană. Pentru a trata durerea, trebuie să tratăm omul în persoană.” I find it hard to read books written by doctors but Dr. Monty Lyman turned out to be an exception. He is a medical doctor, author and research fellow at the University of Oxford. When an old injury started to hurt again, I thought I would read up on the pain which led me to this book: The Painful Truth. In this book, Dr. Lyman looks at the various aspects of the pain which are quite uncommon but make a lot of sense and I don't think that most of the doctors pay attention to the various facets of pain discussed in the book. A few things I've learned from the book: The brain contains a chemistry set that can manage and feel pain, full of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, opioids and cortisol which as this book explains, is a protective mechanism.Even if we know, deep down, that pain isn’t a measure of tissue damage, many of us act (and many health professionals treat their patients) as though pain is produced in the body and detected by the brain. Pain is a conscious translation of our unconscious brain’s decision that the body is in danger. V. S. Ramachandran, the eminent Indian–American neuroscientist, puts it well: ‘Pain is an opinion on the organism’s state of health rather than a mere reflective response to injury.’ In 1995, a twenty-nine-year-old British builder was clambering down a building’s scaffolding and, when he was near enough to the ground, decided to jump down onto a plank of wood. What he didn’t realize was that there was a fifteen-centimetre nail protruding up from the plank, which went straight through his left boot. The builder and his nail were brought into hospital; the man was in so much agony that he had to be given the powerful pain reliever fentanyl as well as a sedative. The builder’s boot was carefully cut away by the medical team, revealing the nail to have penetrated between his toes, causing no injury whatsoever. In SnowWorld - a virtual world, burns sufferers hurl snowballs while undergoing their notoriously painful wound care - diversion is a potent pain reliever. We know pain when we feel it. We fear it and try to avoid it. But do we know what it really is? We're currently experiencing a Renaissance in pain science. In recent years our understanding of pain has altered so radically it's fair to say that everything we thought we knew about pain is wrong. As Dr Monty Lyman reveals, we misunderstand pain - with harmful consequences.

The painful truth by Monty Lytham looks at how so many of us suffer pain without truly understanding what it is and how it impacts on us. The best way to look at pain is as something that is a protective mechanism to help us deal with things that we may not be aware of going on inside the body. These are some of my takeaway ideas from this wonderful book:

Select a format:

creierul se poate modifica prin așteptări, efectul placebo putând schimba simptomele resimțite la nivelul creierului. Efectul nocebo are și el consecințe, însă negative Most of us have experienced pain. We fear it and try to avoid it. But do we know what it really is? The author then talked about the value of simple, repetitive movements that can release serotonin through such simple approaches carrying out art and craft activities or knitting in particular which can help people reduce the feeling of pain. Through small repetitive movements, pain can become much more manageable in how we deal with percieve pain.

There appears to be a difference between people seeking pleasure and avoiding pain but actually the true analogy is people seeking rewards and avoiding punishment. Some of us find pain to be pleasurable, think of people who do marathon runs, or like me, love hot chilli peppers. And somebody who might think a mouldy piece of bread is disgusting when they are fully fed might consider it a pleasure or a reward to those who have been starving for two days.

Wordle Helper

An accessible and well-written book... [Dr Lyman] takes us into the world of pain: its weirdness, its growing pervasiveness and how it's been misunderstood for centuries. ― Mail on Sunday durerea nu este detectată de creier, ci este un produs al său, creat de un tipar de activitate care implică mai multe regiuni ale creierului ( se activează mai multe zone care au legătură cu senzorialul, emoționalul, cognitivul). Acest tipar se numește neurosemnătură We're currently experiencing a Renaissance in pain science. In recent years our understanding of pain has altered so radically it's fair to say that everything we thought we knew about pain is wrong. As Dr Monty Lyman reveals, we misunderstand pain - with harmful consequences. The author explains how hypnotherapy helped him with irritable bowel syndrome syndrome and research is showing hypnotherapy can work on some elements of pain.

It's worth reading the chapter and information around the neurotransmitters opioids and dopamine which both perform important tasks in how we perceive pain. Often a dopamine will release a sort of pleasure in allowing us to seek something but also is released when pain has been removed and released from us so it gives us another additional pleasure hit. These two neurotransmitters are absolutely essential to understanding how the human mind and behaviour work. The science of pain and its reality has been linked to real-life situations and practices masterfully in “The Painful Truth”, and one of the areas that the author focuses on is that of medical trials, especially concerning the use of placebos. An interesting concept is that of the “Open-label placebo” which involves actually telling the patient that whatever they are taking is a placebo instead of the real drug. Fascinatingly, this has been found to be effective in pain relief, often actually being as successful as a placebo given in the usual context blind to the patient. This time, there is actually no ethical issues. Ethics is an idea that is commonly brought up in this book, which good ethical practice being central to medicine and how humans conduct medical practices. A reason we should try to maintain a healthy weight isn't just because increased weight adds to stress on our bones and muscles but also because it increases diseases within our fat cells.There is lots of interesting information on the value of social relationships including things in synchronicity like singing. Fascinating information around bias around race even in medical students. And in women where much of the 20th century they were given hysterectomies when they were said to be in pain and that pain was not treated in the same way as it might've been had they been male. The value and role of isolation is as significant as the risk of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So we need to find ways that we can synchronise and help people socialise and not feel that isolation. The link between isolation and pain is very real. Showing once again the impact of emotions, feelings and expectation It's important to state that pain is very real, but the brain can become hypersensitive to pain received and that persistent pain continues can be something that remains in the head. Some people have had amputations but can have something that's called phantom limb syndrome. Even though they have an arm or leg that has been removed, they can still feel pain in that part of the body which shows that pain is created in the brain. Three-quarters of all amputees can experience phantom pain syndrome. Simple psychological programs can reduce the pain by creating an illusion where they see an imagined arm that they believe is real and scratch it or rub it and the pain can be reduced or even disappears.