“Your pain wont damage you”  – it sounds a strange thing to say but it is a phrase I use regularly in my clinic particularly with those who suffer chronic back pain. I have blogged about this before.

Beliefs about how pain is experienced and interpreted are key to managing conditions in people who have long term pain. Arguably introducing musculoskeletal pain sufferers to the concepts inherent in something called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT could help people cope so much better with the burden of putting up with chronic discomfort.

Sufferers need a broad approach to enable them to help themselves and understanding some of the concepts behind how we experience pain is thought to be helpful and to my mind makes perfect common sense.

An excellent article in an Occupational Therapist’s blog called Health Skills puts it far better than I in article written here.

Two points I found that resonated well  are that essentially pain is a personal experience, different from one person to another and therefore that has implications for its management.

The second is that there are definite neurological mechanisms that help to explain why someone in long term discomfort has a  sensitive nervous system that can be easily influenced by lots of things and sharing this with sufferers is helpful.

For back pain sufferers who have repeated episodes I think it is really important to introduce them to some of these concepts early so that the chances of the cycle of chronic pain is not triggered.

CBT is available locally in some  GP practices, the back pain pathway and also at the Pain Clinic but it is important that anyone in the business of caring for those in pain understand its concepts are ready to encourage people to look at pain as something that can be lived with and accepted and that it need not define them.

Easy to say and very much more difficult to do.