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Case Study 1:
Paying too much attention to a spouse's back pain can make
it worse, and leaving the spouse alone can make it better, according to a study
presented by German psychologists.
What I find interesting is what's not in the study. How long had each of
the study participants had back pain? Someone with fresher pain will react
differently than someone who has had it for years. Also, knowing the cause
of the pain does impact the ability to deal with it. If newbies and oldies
had been combined, compared and contrasted, that woulda been more of value.
Given time, many can raise their pain threshhold, compensating and
adjusting to it. New injury or complications can lower the pain tolerance in
a flash, as well. But time does heal to some extent...so does getting a
psychological handle on it.
The second part I find more logical. I feel the brain/body connection
does remember unrelieved pain. It makes sense that the brain would remember
in order to avoid a repeat of injury. So the argument that a young child
won't remember pain is just not so. Being a young child is no reason to
withhold anesthetics or pain relief. I hope this gets some pediatric
specialists to rethink what they do.
Patients with back problems showed almost three times as much brain activity
when their spouse was in the same room, but that activity dropped when the
spouse left, according to research presented Sunday at the annual conference of
the Society for Neuroscience.
The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Heidelberg.
``It's as if the spouse has become a stimulating cue for the pain,'' said Herta
Flor, the psychologist who ran the study.
In Flor's study, people with chronic back pain were split into two groups. In
one, the pain victim was married to someone who responded to the discomfort
with massages, medicine, and other attention.
In the other, partners downplayed the pain, sometimes leaving the room or
distracting the person with other activities. Flor said that was the best
course of action.
``A spouse can be overly supportive almost to the point where they're enabling
the pain,'' said Dr. Eugene Melvin, an Orlando pain specialist. ``Just a little
bit of pain on the patient's part can cause a severe overreaction to the point
where they don't let the patient do anything for themselves.''
Also Sunday, researchers Haverford College in Pennsylvania found that untreated
pain at birth may lead to lowered sensitivity to pain later in life.
In the study, Wendy Sternberg and her colleagues performed abdominal surgery on
40 mice the day they were born. Half of the mice received morphine and half
received only salt water solution.
For a control, the researchers also treated mice that did not have surgery with
either morphine or the salt water.
When the animals reached adulthood, they were then given a series of tests that
measured their responses to pain.
``We found an overall lowering of pain sensitivity among those subjects who had
surgery with no pain treatment compared to those that underwent surgery and
received morphine and compared to those who did not undergo surgery,''
Sternberg said.
She said the research may eventually help scientists determine why adults have
very different perceptions of pain.
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