When you get hurt or sick, your body’s normal response is pain, which is a sign that something is wrong. This is known as chronic pain syndrome. Most of the time, when your body heals, you stop hurting. Many people don’t like the idea of taking a pill every day to relieve pain. They always wonder how to relieve pain without medicine.
Pain that lasts for three months or more can make it hard to do the things you need to do every day. Whether you have pain in your lower back or a headache that won’t go away, you might be surprised to learn that you might not need painkillers to feel better. There are many ways to deal with chronic pain.
If you try alternative therapies, you might find a way to deal with the pain that works for you. We all know how important it is to get rid of the pain. So don’t give up on trying to find a way out of your pain.
As part of pain management, it’s our job to help patients find the best options for them. We often think about alternatives to medication. So here are some alternatives.
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11 Magical Pain Control Techniques
So are you ready to learn how to manage pain without medicine? When getting ready for any way to deal with chronic pain, it’s important to learn how to focus and take deep breaths to calm the body. Relaxing is hard to learn, especially when you are in pain. It helps to be able to relax muscles all over the body and start to take your mind off the pain.
Techniques for dealing with chronic pain start with controlled deep breathing, as follows:
Deep Breathing
Deep breathing is a pain control technique that helps you to relieve pain. Try to get into a relaxed and reclining position in a dark room and either close both eyes or focus on a point. In the next step slow down breathing and take deep breaths. One study reveals that slow and deep breathing helps you to relieve pain and improves your activity.
Remember, try to use the chest than the abdomen. If you get distracted, thinking of a word like “relax” can help you control your breathing and get back on track. This process can be done by repeating the syllable “re” while breathing in and “lax” while breathing out.
Continue for another 2 to 3 minutes of controlled breathing.
Hot and Cold Compression
For some kinds of injuries, these two tried-and-true methods are still the best way to relieve pain. If a homemade hot or cold pack doesn’t help, try asking a physical therapist or doctor for their versions, which can reach deeper into the muscle and tissue.
Change Your Attention
This is a common way to show how powerfully the mind can change how things feel in the body. Focusing on a non-painful part of the body (hand, foot, etc.) and adjusting how that part of the body feels is one way to change focus. For example, think about the hand getting warmer. This keeps the mind from focusing on where the pain is coming from, like in the back or neck.
Dissociation Technique
As the name suggests, this method for dealing with chronic pain involves mentally dividing the painful body part from the rest of the body or imagining that the body and mind are separate, and the chronic pain is far away from the mind. For example, picture the painful lower back sitting on a chair across the room and telling it to stay there, far away from the mind.
Splitting Up The Senses
In this method, the painful feeling such as pain, burning, pins, and needles is broken up into smaller parts. For example, if the pain in the leg or back feels hot, the feeling of heat is emphasized and you stop focusing on the hurting.
Yoga And Tai Chi
These two ways to work out involve controlling your breath, meditating, and making gentle movements to stretch and strengthen your muscles. There are many health benefits of yoga that can help people with a wide range of pains, such as headaches, arthritis, and injuries that don’t heal right away.
Biofeedback
With this method, you learn how to relax and breathe with the help of a biofeedback machine. This machine takes information about your body, like your heart rate and blood pressure, and turns it into a graph, a blinking light, or even an animation. Watching the visualizations and making changes to them gives you some control over how your body reacts to pain. One study reveals that the efficacy of biofeedback leads to improvements in pain-related outcomes in the short and long term, both by itself and in combination with other treatments.
Music Is The Magic
Studies have shown that music can help relieve pain during and after surgery and childbirth. Classical music has proven to work especially well, but there’s no harm in trying your favorite genre — listening to any kind of music can distract you from pain or discomfort.
Massage Is Good For You
Massage isn’t just a luxury. it can help relieve pain by working the tension out of muscles and joints, reducing stress and anxiety, and possibly distracting you from pain by giving you a “competing” sensation that takes the place of pain signals.
Occupational Therapy And Physical Therapy
These two areas of expertise can be some of your best friends in the fight against pain. Physical therapists lead you through a series of exercises designed to keep or improve your strength and mobility. Occupational therapists help you learn how to do a variety of daily tasks without making your pain worse.
Hold On Your Counting
When something hurts, it can help to count in silence. Counting can be done by keeping track of how many breaths you take, the number of holes in an acoustic ceiling, the number of floor tiles, or just by making mental pictures and counting them.
Things You Should Consider
Always keep in mind that none of the things you can use to treat pain are perfect. They might not take away all of the pain. Not everyone uses them the same way. You might need to try a few different things and even combine some of them before you get enough pain relief.
There may be risks and side effects with any treatment. There are many different treatment options for chronic pain. Talk to your nearest doctor about your chronic pain symptoms. Your doctor can help you decide on a combination of alternative and medical treatments to manage your symptoms.
