All Pain Occurs in the Brain
Pain is the body’s way of warning you about an injury that needs to be taken care of. With chronic pain, pain persists long after the injury has healed. Pain signals keep firing in the nervous system for weeks, months, even years.
The experience of pain involves multiple interactive neural pathways that influence pain signals at several levels at once: Pain pathways become stimulated by painful stimuli and, with repeated stimulation, these pathways can become altered and start firing independently of a painful stimulus. With repeated exposure to certain stimuli, a person becomes more sensitive to the stimuli and responds with greater and longer lasting pain. These changes in the brain, in turn, affect the endocrine …show more content…
So, pain not only stimulates sensory areas of the brain, but activates emotional centers as well, resulting in depression, anxiety and fear.
In addition, depression activates brain centers involved in pain sensation. Evidence shows that the experience of pain is linked to EEG, or brain wave, activity. Teaching patients to alter EEG activity to reflect activity that has been shown to be associated with reduced pain may be promising. More intense pain sensation has been associated with a decrease in alpha activity and an increase in beta activity. Acute pain relief has been associated with decreases in beta and increases in alpha activity. Decreasing some types of medically-related pain has also been associated with rewarding SMR activity, a special frequency of low beta activity, and inhibiting theta activity.
Research applying neurofeedback to the treatment of pain has included multiple chronic pain conditions, including chronic back pain, peripheral nerve injury, pain from cancer, fibromyalgia and migraine headaches. Much of the evidence for the use of neurofeedback to treat chronic pain can be found in the following journal article.
Pain is the body’s way of warning you about an injury that needs to be taken care of. With chronic pain, pain persists long after the injury has healed. Pain signals keep firing in the nervous system for weeks, months, even years.
The experience of pain involves multiple interactive neural pathways that influence pain signals at several levels at once: Pain pathways become stimulated by painful stimuli and, with repeated stimulation, these pathways can become altered and start firing independently of a painful stimulus. With repeated exposure to certain stimuli, a person becomes more sensitive to the stimuli and responds with greater and longer lasting pain. These changes in the brain, in turn, affect the endocrine …show more content…
So, pain not only stimulates sensory areas of the brain, but activates emotional centers as well, resulting in depression, anxiety and fear.
In addition, depression activates brain centers involved in pain sensation. Evidence shows that the experience of pain is linked to EEG, or brain wave, activity. Teaching patients to alter EEG activity to reflect activity that has been shown to be associated with reduced pain may be promising. More intense pain sensation has been associated with a decrease in alpha activity and an increase in beta activity. Acute pain relief has been associated with decreases in beta and increases in alpha activity. Decreasing some types of medically-related pain has also been associated with rewarding SMR activity, a special frequency of low beta activity, and inhibiting theta activity.
Research applying neurofeedback to the treatment of pain has included multiple chronic pain conditions, including chronic back pain, peripheral nerve injury, pain from cancer, fibromyalgia and migraine headaches. Much of the evidence for the use of neurofeedback to treat chronic pain can be found in the following journal article.