Chronic pain can undermine every aspect of your life – your work, relationships, recreational activities, self-esteem, and hope for the future. But you don’t have to just live with it.
One of the biggest challenges in diagnosing and managing chronic pain is the fact that physicians have to rely almost exclusively on the individual’s description of their pain and the disability it causes. But the initial cause or causes of unresolved pain and the mechanisms that sustain it can be multidimensional, and sometimes not obvious.
Clear causes may include traumatic injury to your muscle, bone, or nervous tissue. Less discernable causes could include a previous bacterial or viral illness, environmental toxins, food allergies, neurological disorders, chronic depression, post-traumatic stress disorder – to name a few.
Chronic pain or illness should not define who you are and what you do. You want – and need – a pain specialist who is going to investigate the causes of your particular pain problem, strive to understand exactly how it has affected your life, and work with you to create and implement a personalized and integrative treatment strategy that fits the context of your life.
What actually causes chronic pain?
There are many possible causes, including joint or nerve damage and cancer. However, if a doctor cannot identify the origin of chronic pain or pain persists beyond the point of expected healing, inflammation in the brain could be the cause.
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What exactly is brain inflammation or “neuro-inflammation”?
Microglia
The brain contains different kinds of cells, among them microglia.
These cells act as the immune system of the Central Nervous System. Microglia cells are responsive to and activated by a wide variety of environmental stimuli, such as repeated injury, infection, toxins, traumas, or emotional blows. In response to these external “threats” microglia go into attack mode — they become upregulated — to destroy the threat.
However, when they react too often they can sometimes remain hyper-active keeping the brain in a chronic state of inflammation. Constant inflammation in the brain can result in not only chronic pain but also depression, anxiety disorders, and other health issues.
Chronic pain has always been a mystery. It often returns at the slightest provocation, even when doctors “can’t find anything wrong”. Oddly enough, whether the pain is physical or emotional, traumatic or slight, our brains register all pain as the same thing, and these signals can keep firing in the nervous system for months, even years.
A multi-disciplinary approach to diagnosing and treating your pain
Finding a cure for your chronic pain requires “extinguishing” the inflammatory response of the microglia.
An integrative approach to healing chronic pain benefits the patient by identifying and treating all of the factors that are causing inflammation to achieve a more rapid, complete, and permanent resolution of his or her condition. This may include osteopathic and other manual medicine approaches, pharmaceutical, herbal, homeopathic, and nutritional medicine, medical acupuncture, ayurvedic medicine, and mind-body medicine which incorporates stress reduction and relaxation techniques.
Our Integrative Medicine Providers
At The Kaplan Center, you will find a highly dedicated and skilled team of medical professionals working towards one common goal: returning you to optimal health and keeping you there. In addition to our board-certified physicians, our medical team includes licensed physical therapists, a psychotherapist, a nutritionist, an acupuncturist, a meditation instructor, and two registered nurses.
Take the Next Step and Speak with a Nurse about Your Chronic Pain Condition
The best way to reach us is to give us a call. If you’d like to learn more about the conditions we treat, click here.
We are here for you, and we want to help.
Our goal is to return you to optimal health as soon as possible. To schedule an appointment please call: 703-532-4892 x2
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