ANTI AGING MEDICINE

Pain Management and Stress
- Power of your Mind to Change your Body

Over 14 million people over the world live with persistent pain and of those, almost one in four said that pain had kept them from their usual activities (including work) on at least 14 days in the last three months. This also included becoming less active and unfit and creating a 'no go' list of things to do.

Our work in our clinic has shown that many people get stuck in a vicious persistent pain cycles that repeats and escalates over time.

In the USA alone 100 million American adults suffer from chronic pain. As the incidence of chronic pain grows, so does the number of opioid prescriptions, surgeries, and visits to the doctor’s office. The annual economic cost of chronic pain is estimated at $600B, and the impact on the individual is just as severe. On average, chronic pain sufferers earn 37% less income, are more prone to depression and opioid addiction, and are 4X as likely to commit suicide.

Fortunately, modern scientific research is beginning to paint a clear path out of the current chronic pain epidemic. Study after study - from the best scientists and institutions in the world - show that the brain-mind-body union play a much more significant role in chronic pain than we once thought. This means that chronic pain is not solely a condition of the body. And therefore, by offering therapy to the brain, we can break the ongoing cycle of pain.

AAIA’s mission is to provide widespread access to evidence-based, safe, and effective chronic pain therapy for those in need.

HOW IT WORKS
When pain persists, becoming “chronic” research shows that psychological and emotional elements can play a major role. These non-physical components can help the brain “learn” to be in pain, re-wiring the body’s neural circuitry to perpetuate the sensation of pain.

With our cognitive plasticity tools attention the brain can "unlearn" pain, paving the way to physical pain relief. Research shows that methods like education, mindfulness and meditation, visualization, and cognitive behavioral therapy can successfully help the brain to stop this recurring pain cycle.

AAIA’s proprietary methodology is tailored to meet each pain sufferer’s needs.

THE PAIN CYCLE AND HOW TO FIND A WAY OUT!

RECOGNISING THE PAIN CYCLE
Becoming aware of this cycle can enable you, to gain back control and release the pain. Learning how to manage your pain well and lead to you begin to live a full and satisfying life again.

USING AAIA's PAIN TOOLKIT
By calming our brain and central nervous system down (which is after all what sends the pain!) it allows us to regain control of our life instead of the pain controlling what you can and cannot do.

Our self-management program helps ease muscle tension/ discomfort and enables the Autonomic Nervous System to switch from "fight and flight" (sympathetic) to "rest, relax and repair" (parasympathetic) mode.

Everyone in fact should learn pain self-management skills and use them in everyday activities. It is certainly is not all up to your doctor or healthcare team to manage your pain.

Science-Backed Way to Relieve Stress

When we experience stress our body enters a self-protection mode and gears our immune system, heart rate, attention and memory for survival.

However, when stress is chronic it turns into bad stress—also known as distress. It can impact our health; we literally feel under attack. It’s not just a feeling, either. Our body physically and automatically reacts as if it is under threat of siege.

When our body is constantly (rather than just momentarily) geared up for self-protection, our systems fatigue and start to decline. Immunity drops, inflammation creeps in, attention and memory start to fail and sleeping problems arise. Other physical changes can also occur, like shallow breathing, tense muscles, anxiety and the release of stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline.

That threat usually comes from within in the form of pain and anxiety, so protective reactions fall short. The body unwittingly attacks itself with reactions that serve to worsen the problems of distress.

It’s easy to feel powerless against this type of stress, but research has shown there’s a lot we can do. The solution, it turns out, is not to escape the pain or negative emotions. Rather, it is to change the way the mind and the body react to them. New Science has shown that these skills literally train the brain away from both physical and emotional pain.

The most effective and efficient way to do this is through cognitive neuroplasticity therapy (CNT), which helps people identify and change unhelpful beliefs and thoughts that make physical or emotional pain worse.

Scripts like “there is nothing I can do to reduce my negative feelings” and “I can’t do any of things I love because of my pain” can be reframed and replaced.

People using CNT acknowledge their challenges and establish patterns of thinking and action that support better mood, positive actions and reduced suffering, such as automatically thinking, “even though I feel challenged right now, I can use my CNT technique to help calm, soothe and heal myself.”

CNT has a preventive role too: research shows that training the brain away from stress and pain leaves you less likely to experience future pain. CNT's simple 10 minute exercise helps people refocus on the positive behavioral drivers that reduce negative feelings. These technique are evidenced-based treatments for pain.

The data is clear: the simple practical skills taught in our Course can be applied to harness the body’s potential to heal itself. After regular use hardwired “pain reactions” or “stress reactions” can be reprogrammed to support better health and wellbeing.
 

Clients learn how to train their brains away from pain, with lasting results. Within just a week of practice, by entraining new neural networks that correlate with pain relief, clients already report having significantly less pain.

Every year millions of patients develop chronic pain after surgery, in part due to mindset factors. A negative pain mindset has been shown to affect surgical outcomes more powerfully than the disease, the surgeon, or the surgery type.

Recent research has shown that a targeted, two-hour pain relief mindset session with a client is sufficient to equip them with the necessary tools to alter the trajectory of their pain. They gain control over their own experience of pain. Now, some of the world’s leading research hospitals are applying mindset science to help prevent pain after surgery.

Example: Stanford University School of Medicine are characterizing patients before surgery to determine who is at risk. Then the patient is introduced them to a pain relief mindset intervention designed to help them optimize their postsurgical outcomes.

Science conducted by various research groups has shown that a negative pain mindset entrains neural networks and brain connectivity in such a way that the nervous system is primed for future pain.

AAIA’s effective mindset intervention for pain changes the physical structure—and the functioning of the brain—so the client is primed for relief. Pain relief skills can be easily learnt and the incorporated into a daily 10 minute mind exercise. It follows that pain processing is diminished in the nervous system.

Special Note: Today, specialist research hospitals are applying mindset science to the largest health issue in the United States: risks associated with long-term opioid use. Many patients would like to reduce their opioid use but believe and fear that their pain will worsen if they do. Mindset interventions enhance patients’ positive expectations and therefore their willingness to taper their opioids. Rather than forcing persons addicted to opioid use down a care pathway that amplifies their fears, they are guided to a path to with less pain and fewer pills.

Ideally Health care professionals refer their patients to enrol in pain relief mindset interventions as early as possible to help treatments work faster.
 

Is it possible for people to decide to get well?

The Mind-Body Interface Conference Summary report 2017
Academy of Medical Sciences (comprising UK’s leading medical scientists from hospitals and academia).

Our brain's interface with our body.
“The vagus nerve comprises over 100,000 nerve fibres, of which 80% are sensory and connect the brain to almost every organ in the body. Professor Tracey explained that the vagus nerve is involved in normal physiology and homeostasis of most organs and the immune system.”

Research has shown how the immune system can be regulated by the brain via the Vagus Nerve.
A growing body of research has now shown that people's mindsets have driven placebo responses where a patient's health changes. This has also led researchers to consider how a placebo or mindset change can affect the vagus nerve. For example; recent clinical trials have shown how inflammatory markers have been reduced in inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. The Report concludes that as a change of mindset can affect connections in the brain that trigger a positive physiological outcome, other forms of mental stimulation such as cognitive behavioural therapy and mindfulness which can change a person’s perception, attitude and thinking should also be considered.

TNE (2018)
Therapeutic neuroscience education (TNE) has been shown to be effective in the treatment of mainly chronic musculoskeletal pain conditions. Emerging research shows how patients who were shown how to change their mind-set regards pain produced impressive immediate and long-term changes, such as; decreased pain, improved function / movement and, increased calming of the brain (as seen on brain scans).

In summary, Therapeutic Neuroscience Education is now successfully used by some of the world's leading musculoskeletal clinics to change a patient’s perception of pain (change of mind-set) resulting in lower pain and increased mobility.
 

Your mindset can even rewind aging, physically and mentally!
Florida State University College of Medicine psychologist and gerontologist Antonio Terracciano states subjective age is correlated with factors such as walking speed, lung capacity, grip strength, and bodily inflammation. As his work, among others, shows, it’s not necessarily the body influencing the mind. Your mindset about aging has an equally important role in aging. Terracciano's research has shown that this affects cognition: a belief in a higher subjective age correlates with cognitive impairments and even dementia.

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