To treat back pain, look to the brain not the spine | Aeon Essays

For patient after patient seeking to cure chronic back pain, the experience is years of frustration. Whether they strive to treat their aching muscles, bones and ligaments through physical therapy, massage or rounds of surgery, relief is often elusive – if the pain has not been made even worse. Now a new working hypothesis explains why: persistent back pain with no obvious mechanical source does not always result from tissue damage. Instead, that pain is generated by the central nervous system (CNS) and lives within the brain itself.I caught my first whiff of this news about eight years ago, when I was starting the research for a book about the back-pain industry. My interest was both personal and professional: I'd been dealing with a cranky lower back and hip for a couple of decades, and things were only getting worse. Over the years, I had tried most of what is called'conservative treatment' such as physical therapy and injections. To date, it had been a deeply unsatisfying journey.Like most people, I was convinced that the problem was structural: something had gone wrong with my skeleton, and a surgeon could make it right. When a neuroscientist I was interviewing riffed on the classic lyric from My Fair Lady, intoning:'The reign of pain is mostly in the brain,' I was not amused. I assumed that he meant that my pain was, somehow, not real. It was real, I assured him, pointing to the precise location, which was a full yard south of my cranium.Like pract...
Source: Psychology of Pain - Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs