My Approach

Pain Analysis Development

Pain Analysis development is a concept that helps to get to the root cause of pain. This process begins with helping my clients to realize that pain is not their problem but is actually a result of their problem. This is all based upon the following:

Establishing which of the Fundamentals of Pain Induction are having the greatest impact on your painful condition.
Determining how to reduce or eliminate their impact.

By using a pain analysis journal I will help you to reconnect with yourself, by working with you to establish the correlation of the aggravators to your painful condition with events, primary food, and circumstances over time.

The use of the Pain Analysis Journal also will help you to establish trend analysis of your pain levels by, hours, days, weeks and months as they correlate with specific aggravators that you may be overlooking but are very aware of. This gives you a very detailed insight to what is exactly having the greatest impact to your condition and will allow you to be prepared in advance to avoid or better deal with these obstacles.

What it all boils down to is rather than trying to manage pain, which is really not the problem in the first place, Pain Analysis Development offers my clients the opportunity to manage what is aggravating their pain or even eliminate it. This modality is complementary to any Pain Management Program and will only enhance its effectiveness.

Some benefits of this are you:

Gain a better understanding of why you are hurting.
Learn to be more in tune with your body.
Learn how to control or manage your pain triggers.
Gain a feeling of control of your condition.
Come to the understanding that your body is not confused but knows what it is doing.
Gain the confidence to move forward in your condition.
Are you tired of suffering from your painful condition, then schedule your complementary initial consultation.

Fundamentals of Pain Induction

As complex as our body is in its processes, its method of conveying those processes is simple. So what do I mean by that? Take into consideration the process that must take place for you to just digest the food you have eaten. It is no different than what takes place for any type of action and begins with:

Triggering of the receptor proteins on the outside of the neurons.
The right atmosphere for the negative sodium ions to be transmitted across the protein cell barrier into the cell nucleus to create the proper imbalance to create an action potential.
The action potential must then be strong enough to bring about the same on the receiving receptor protein of the next neuron.

Once again as complex as this process is, it is nothing more than the transmission of information, in other words communication. The complexity is in all of the work that it took just to both receive and send forth information. That information just so happens to be a command in the form of some neurotransmitter that will cause some lazy protein to start tearing apart all the starch it comes in contact with. That is only if the message just so happens to reach it in the first place.

Before we go any further into this lets breakdown each of the fundamentals into what they contain:

Mental

First of all what we are looking at here is how the impacts of anxiety, your emotions, and perception stimulate the onset of a painful state upon the body. This has absolutely nothing to do with saying that your pain is just a psychological phenomenon. It is a realization of the direct link that these things have upon the initiation and the contribution of pain. Out of the two perceptions is more so a crucial precursor of the severity that anxiety and the emotions will have upon your overall painful situation.

How can I say such a thing and is this nothing more than a contradiction of what I said about it not being just a psychological issue?

The easiest way to answer this is with a little scenario from my own life. First of all it is a fact that you must absolutely be conscious in order for you to literally feel pain. So in my case one of the issues I have is being very sensitive to rising or very warm temperatures. If I am in too warm of an environment I will gradually experience pain from tolerable to get out of dodge and want to lose my mind in the process if I don’t act accordingly. So in this scenario I am lying peacefully in my bed at night cuddled next to my beautiful Puerto Rican wife. Since it was a very cold night and I did not want my wife nor children to freeze I adjust the thermostat to about 76 degrees and promptly turn on our ceiling fan to compensate for me. However, little do I realize that as I lay all snuggled next to Mami, her body heat mixed with the room temp begins some serious action potential expression within. I’m still fluctuating now somewhere between stage 4 on my way to stage 2 of sleep so for the most part while the body is screaming fire my mind is like,” this beach has the best virgin Pina Colada’s I’ve ever tasted, life is grand.”

Suddenly I hit R.E.M. and the mind goes sniff, sniff, “Is something burning?” My sleepy eyes open up I immediately push away from my wife who now feels as if she is a furnace. However, seconds later my body begins to tingle with eruptions of intensifying pain and I began to do my best to breath and keep myself calm, only to yield to the intensifying pain and leap from my bed to find solace in the bathroom as I run cold water over my hands and splash it up into my face to help me to cool down since I don’t sweat.

So let’s look at this same scenario from just the aspect of the influence perception could have played out. The moment I realized that I was hot when I had awoken is the moment perceptions role had begun. Now if I took the perception of, “My wife feels like a furnace and I know that when I get too hot I end up in excruciating pain?”

Is it not likely that my anxiety levels are going to increase and my emotional state is going to be leaning more toward unstable? For this example let’s say that they are. Do you think that my pain levels will be the same as they would have if I had the perception that, “My wife feels like a furnace and I know that when I get too hot I end up in excruciating pain but its okay, stay calm and just breathe, everything is going to be fine, I know what I can do to mitigate this?”

Do you begin to see at all the likely type of impact such an outlook will have upon my pain output. Please realize I’m not saying that this is all it takes or that this is all that there is to it. For now I am only focusing on one piece of the whole and just the components that relate to it specifically and how they stimulate pain. Remember these are only a piece of a whole and therefore work in conjunction with the remaining pieces to equal a total net output of pain aggravation or alleviation.

Hopefully to make this all clear the mental fundamental aspect of pain begins with the perception of the situation and pain itself. It is from here that the brain will then adjust itself emotionally to deal with this. Pain itself can be a cause, effect or both of what is perceived by the individual. On that note it is important to realize that it is perception that controls what the mind understands of its environment. Therefore, based upon what is perceived the mind will cause the body to respond appropriately.

Why can I say this?

The reason is that to your mind there is no difference between fantasy and reality. The only reason your mind can differentiate between the two is solely based upon your level of perception.

You find that a little hard to swallow don’t you, so once again let me use my own self scenario. I will let you in on a little secret; this one as well as the other are not made up events but have really taken place in my life.

So one day I’m just a happy go lucky tween doing what boys do best . . . looking for trouble. I found myself kicking around a grass meridian nestled between a fork in the road looking for a stick. What is it with boys and sticks? As my eyes darted around the ground before me one stick in particular caught my attention. It was just perfect to meet whatever my needs were at that time. In my eagerness to reach down and grasp it, two beady onyx black eyes that protruded from either side of its tip brought my arm to a screeching halt. My heart now pounding I stood there frozen like a statue and thanking God that the snake that I thought was a stick did not use my hand for a fang rest.

Now to this day I still don’t realize how that snake turned into a stick and then back into a snake. Perhaps it was a transformer. All jokes aside, for all intents and purposes I was fully convinced that that snake lying on the ground in the grass was in fact a stick and if it were not for the grace of God that alerted me to its two beady little eyes, I just may not be sitting here telling you this story today. I am also persuaded that all of you reading this can add your own story about how perception clouded your mind to believe something that was not. I’m just trying to get through to you the fact that it also has the power to greatly amplify, initiate or reduce the level of pain that you feel and it is also a very fundamental aspect that needs to be addressed when you are looking into seriously alleviating it.

Nutrition

This fundamental encompasses the foods that you eat and the possible impact that they have on your painful condition. However, when we speak of nutrition we are concerned more so with what is or is not present in the foods that you are consuming and what their role is in the total functioning of your body as a whole. It would be on this notion that nutrition has a very significant role to play in the levels of pain that you deal with. Now with that said it would also be quite counter intuitive to neglect the significance of nutrition’s role in trying to seriously neutralize any prolonging painful condition.

Although, I must once again stress the fact that this is also another piece of the whole and is not significant to solely place the greater emphasis upon such in order to remedy or even alleviate the pain issue. I will remind you once more pain is not really the issue but the issue lies within the parts of the whole such as nutrition and addressing those avenues within that part that are exasperating or triggering the painful condition.

At the very heart of this fundamental lies:

Vitamins
Minerals
Hydration
Oxygenation

Of course there is also proteins, fats, carbohydrates and so on but I would dare to say that the proper functioning of the rest depend much upon the four above.

So let’s take a look at this from another perspective and see how it verifiably is directly correlated with your chronic painful issues. We will do so by looking at a little scenario.

Let’s just say I suffer from an issue called small fiber neuropathy, which I do by the way, and according to my skin punch biopsy results:

Examination of the right calf on 5/30/2007 was, skin with significantly reduced epidermal nerve fiber density, consistent with small fiber neuropathy.
Examination of the right thigh on 5/30/2007 was skin with significantly reduced epidermal nerve fiber density, consistent with small fiber neuropathy.
There are no histological abnormalities based on H&E stain. No amyloid is detected by the Congo Red stain.
The normative values for epidermal nerve fiber (ENF) density are evaluated by counting 3 – 6 different sections of each specimen and expressed as a number per millimeter length of epidermis. Any value that is equal to the fifth percentile or less is considered to be significantly reduced nerve fiber density, consistent with small fiber neuropathy. The fifth percentile value for the thigh is 8.0 per millimeter. The fifth percentile value for the distal leg is 5.0 per millimeter.
Epidermal nerve fiber density test results below:

– Right Calf result value 2.12/mm

– Right thigh result value 4.25mm

Evaluation comment from Charles Shao, MD, is that both biopsies revel epidermal nerve fibers loss with axonal thinning and uneven distribution observed with the anti-PGP 9.5 immunohistochemical stain.

Something you need to realize about nerve fibers is that they can either be mylienated or unmylienated, which is in reference to a protective sheath that surrounds them. A significant reduction in this sheath is a significant reduction in the signal transit time. Keep in mind that action potential travels around 220 mph down the axonal pathway to transmit information. However in unmylienated fibers the signal is slower and these fibers are mainly for conducting signals such as pain.

Anyhow, some common issues with Small Fiber Neuropathy just so happen to be bouts of intermittent pain that can be burning, stabbing, shocking or all three and then some simultaneously in specific areas of the body or all over the body. So how could or would nutrition possibly have anything to do with such a condition as this?

In a word, everything. It could be both a cause and exasperation of the condition.

Lets do a short roll call of various nutrients that directly impact the nervous system:

Copper
B – 12
Potassium

A deficiency in any of these three would eventually lead to some nervous problems. However, it would only be that simple if it just worked that way. You see minerals and vitamins all jostle for the same receptors, so an imbalance in one for a prolonged period would eventually lead to an imbalance in the other. So if I for whatever reason did not happen to realize that I was lacking in these areas after receiving my diagnosis it would make things quite difficult and rather nerve wracking not having any clue as to why I was the way that I am. I’m not saying that the nutrition is or was the sole underlying factor in my diagnosis but it certainly does have its place in my continued disturbances. So If I were to give it the right attention that it deserves I just may be able to help bring some greater alleviation that all the pharmaceuticals fail to really do considering I would be addressing part of what is behind my painful episodes in the first place.

One thing I can tell you since I’m speaking about myself is that this approach does work and I have done just that, achieved a greater alleviation to the point that I’ve been controlling things without pharmaceuticals for years now by addressing this fundamental along with all of the others in varying degrees. I say varying degrees because I am still learning how these various fundamentals really play out in my journey to total elimination of my painful state and so far so good.

Just in case it is not apparent to you, I speaking of the point that when you address the nutritional fundamental of trying to understand what you have not been getting or what you may be getting too much of or even what is not agreeing with you it begins to give you as an individual more insight into the interworking of your painful condition. The kind of insight that you become much more aware of what is behind the scenes and then you are able to address these things rather than be side tracked by your pain which is once again a secondary event or problem but not the underlying problem that you are dealing with. Medication alone is ineffective in achieving such which is why we must understand these fundamental attributes which are the same for everyone regardless of race, gender, demographics or age. They will always play a role in initiating, aggravating or relieving the painful condition.

Physical

This fundamental encompasses both the external and internal physical aspects that affect your painful condition. Don’t be fooled considering that the greatest impact to your physical state has much to do with the environment and that too goes for you internally just as much as it does externally. While you may grow weary of the reminder, I will emphasize the fact that we are only looking at a piece of the whole and it is not significant to solely place the greater emphasis upon such in order to remedy or even alleviate the pain issue.

So why is the environment such a factor? The environment is such a great factor due to:

The fact that it is somewhat constant or static, in other words you often are unable to change it.
What you do or don’t do actually adds to the total impact of the environment upon your person.
The type of environment either significantly makes your painful condition much worse or extremely better whether you like it or not.

I’m sure this all could be quite a mouthful to swallow if you are not accustomed to understanding such in accordance with pain but I will assure and explain to you how vital it is to realize this. You will also see how easily that the physical impact externally and internally can play out due to the environment alone.

Falling bridges

In order to convey this truth to you, once again we will call upon our tall, dark, and fearless model to act out another scenario for us . . . ME. Drum roll please. Okay, just to lay the foundation here let’s say that I was very sensitive to heat, and excitement even to the extent of not tolerating the metabolic sensations of joyfulness, anger, happiness, and such. All of these on top of the increase in temperature would eventually end up in me being in very excruciating pain from head to toe.

Being the good husband I am, since I am feeling pretty good I decide to tackle making dinner for the family on a cold winter evening. At this time the windows in the kitchen are closed and I have a few pots permeating the air with a wonderful blend of spices and cooking meat. The longer I stand in front of the stove tending to the food I begin to feel some minor tingling sensations throughout my body. I remain calm and stay at it. A few minutes go by and the thermostat drops below 75 degrees and trips the heater. About another ten minutes or so pass and the food is nearly done. However, those tingling sensations gradually increase and become burning stinging sensations that are more so equivalent to a bothersome itch from head to toe. My face feels as if ants are crawling all over it and I want to scratch them off but I decide its best to maybe step back from the stove and just take a break and keep calm.

Suddenly I hear the defiant screams of my second youngest child as my wife calls after him to come to her. Still screaming and pouting he makes his grand entrance into the kitchen where I try to fight back that suddenly rush of adrenaline that pumps through the veins of any parent when dealing with such an episode. Unfortunately, this sudden rush is accompanied by further intensifying burning; stabbing sensations that teeter on the verge of erupting me into a seriously painful episode, with just a little added pressure. My muscles are so tense that my skin feels as if someone is pulling it from the outside in and that it would literally just rip apart, in conjunction with all the burning and stabbing sensations.

Breaking it Down

Just like all the scenarios I have used this far, these are very real events from my personal life that I am sharing with you for you to understand better the correlation of these fundamental aspects in how they relate to your painful state.

So then what is the environment that we have here?

The external environment was the temperature change that was caused by both the cooking and the thermostat.

Then there was the internal environment that was impacted by the above but also by the psychological or mental side of the house. Although I did not mention it, things that excite me cause me to get internally hot as it does for any person but in my case I don’t sweat and heat leads to pain after awhile.

So we have an initiation of my painful state due to the combined efforts of external heat brought upon by:

Cooking
The heat due to the thermostat.

Then we also have the internal rise of body temperature that occurred from my emotional reaction to my defiant son.

So what was the outcome of this?

The outcome was that I ended up in a significant amount of pain. While I was not burned by any of the food, I felt the temperature externally against my skin which would be an external physical influence that began to cause me to feel mild painful sensations. Also these mild sensations were compounded upon by the rise in temperature when the thermostat flipped the heater. Then to top it off there was the internal influence that put me over due to the emotional reaction I had due to my son’s defiant behavior.

So you see although we have solely focused on the environment, it should be apparent at how great of a role it plays in the triggering of your physical external and internal painful aggravators.

Now with that said there are times in which you can control or manipulate the environment in your favor but most of the time that is not the case. In this sense I could have made sure that the heat would not come on or even turned on the A/C unit in our kitchen window to keep things cool enough for me to finish cooking but I could not have stopped my son’s defiant behavior considering I was not in the room with he and my wife.

However, before I close this out I would like to give you an example of what things are like in a different environment. There was a time that I was working for a temp service company and was tasked to assist load cargo into a trailer. The thing is that this required me to work in a freezer warehouse. I have already stated my issues with rising temperature, so being in such an environment was perfect for me to do the type of hard labor required of me. I wore a pull-over sweater and a leather jacket to keep me warm while I built pallets and wrapped them in shrink wrap. The problem was that the faster I worked the hotter I got and I quickly had to discard both the leather jacket and the sweater and work in my T – shirt. I got a lot of funny looks from the other workers who were very well bundled up. I did not take the time to explain the secrets behind my seemingly super human toleration to the extreme cold temperatures but needleless to say I was not phased. I did not even experience the pain I was feeling while I was wearing the leather jacket and sweater while doing the same work.

So how are things different in this example?

First off we have a more favorable environment to compliment the nature of my condition but I still end up in pain. Why is that?

It was due to:

The influence of heat produced from increased activity
The influence of heat produced from layers of clothing.

Both are external physical aggravators to the onset of my painful state. Then we also have the internal production of heat as a result which further compounds upon the later. The end result is escalating levels of pain.

In all of this the environment has not changed but it has been manipulated or adapted to some degree due to my clothing and activity. Likewise, I was able to manipulate things to be more favorable by removing the extra layers in order to be cold enough to compensate for my activity levels. Therefore, the colder it is the more active I could be but once the pain ensued it would then be a matter of decreasing my activity in order to complete the job, which is what I had to do in this case. So now you have been given two opposite examples of how great of a role that the environment plays in the onset of a painful condition.

Molecular

This fundamental is really the culmination of the previous three and yet has its own specific contribution to your painful woes. It is here that the mental, nutritional and physical fundamentals merge and have an overall total output on your painful or chronic condition. Why is this the case? It is so because all of them express themselves on the cellular level in their specific areas but it is the combination of these various routes of stimulation that have the overall impact on your condition. So you can see if you were to solely focus on each it would be difficult to truly determine the complete influence of each and I would debate the necessity in doing such.

The other role the molecular fundamental plays in the influence of pain is in the trigger of environmental influences that directly influence your cellular activity without you even realizing it. That’s right, not only do you not realize it but you have no direct control over this impact either, at least to a certain degree. So what might these things be and how does it all affect the other fundamentals? We will discuss all of that in this article as well as tie it altogether.

Invisible disruption

Whether you are aware of it or not your life is constantly being bombarded by the electromagnetic spectrum in good and bad ways. At least 60% of the electromagnetic spectrum is invisible to us. So what is the electromagnetic spectrum? It is composed of the varying wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation such as:

Cosmic rays
Gama rays
X-rays
Ultraviolet light
Visible light (7 rainbow colors.)
Infrared
Microwaves
Radio Waves.

The invisible portions of this are the above excluding the 7 rainbow colors. The thing that is most important to you is the impact that they have on you. The EMS influences you at the cellular level and totally bypasses that of your psyche. So my point here is that this is a total molecular influence that has physical and mental ramifications. This brings us back to the fact that all of these fundamentals are very much separate parts of one whole. The easiest proof of this is what happens when your friend comes back to the office looking like a lobster from lying out in the sun until they were well done. Before I continue, let me stress something here about radiation. In short radiation has to do with energy emissions. Now as concerning the EMS we are concerned with whether that energy is either ionizing or non ionizing. So what is the difference between the two?

The difference is:

Ionizing type radiation is a very large amount of energy. This kind of energy has the ability to disrupt your molecular make up to the point of striping electrons from atoms along with causing damage to DNA and bring about the onset of cancer.
Non – ionizing type radiation will only resonate with an atom but will not disrupt it. In other words this type of radiation is not harmful to the body.

So let’s revisit the lobster red friend issue that got a little too much sun light. That ultra violet light falls on both the ionizing and non ionizing part of the EMS. It really depends on the time of the day like when the sun is at its peak as to which type of ionization you will be exposed to. Either way being inappropriately dressed mixed with overexposure will lead to some serious molecular disruption regardless of how tough you think that you are. I would like to emphasize the fact that the EMS encompasses sound as well as what is visible which could be as simple as radiation of your own voice or that of a loved one. It is important to understand that this radiation impacts you on a molecular level and while the voice may not carry the harmful ionizing impact it does in fact stimulate a certain molecular chain of events that can have an overall positive or negative impact on your person.

Connecting Dots

So the question here is one of how does this all come together in impacting your painful state of being? I will provide a little real life scenario for you and then put all the pieces together as I have been doing. Let’s say that it is the middle of summer and around lunch time in my house. An hour has passed since I began preparing our meal and I have made the necessary preparations as turning on the air conditioner and a fan to keep the temperature from the stove and oven balanced. However, I begin to feel those familiar tingling sensations along with a rapid increase in body temperature. Like usual I decide to slow down a little but not stop until it becomes a burning stabbing like sensations that is rapidly intensifies. I realize at this point if I don’t break, things are going to get really bad really quick.

So I have my wife pick up where I left off and take care of serving everyone. When lunch is over I decide to just take a long break to give my body some cool down time but the children really would like me to go out back with them and play for a bit. I let them out and decide to rest at least a half hour and out I go. The sun is out and barely a cloud in sight. A gentle breeze brushes my face in its coolness and so far things seem to have quieted within. After a few minutes of UV bombardment my body explodes from head to toe in increasing sensations of burning and stabbing pain and I quickly retreat to the comfort of indoors.

So let’s fundamentally break down these events and identify the root cause of the pain I was dealing with. Before I start, it doesn’t matter in what order you begin to analyze all of this. What is really important is understanding the role that these various fundamentals play and addressing them individually and collectively in order to gain control over your situation. Also you must realize that although they have their own separate input they have a combined total output.

In the case of me cooking in the kitchen we will first began to look at the various factors of the physical fundamental that influenced the induction of my painful state:

Heat from the stove
Heat from the oven
Heat from outside
Body heat from exertion.

Yes I did have the air conditioner on along with a fan blowing to help compensate but the combination of the above eventually became greater than the benefit of coolness that they provided and therefore I became too hot and pain thus ensued.

Okay so what about the mental fundamental? I generally stay cool under pressure but like any person when the pain begins to intensify past my threshold I start to slowly lose my grip. In this scenario that would have been when I realized that things were getting pretty intense but I decided to try pushing on. Shortly after this my anxiety levels go off the chart and so does my pain and I quickly retreat. My perceived state is that I can’t take this, it is too much. From what you have learned so far in this series, which way are my pain levels going to go? If you said up than pat yourself on the back because you are a most astute pupil.

In consideration of the nutrition fundamental let’s say that I had coffee after my meal. Big deal right. It actually is quite a significant deal in my situation. The reason why is any time I consume coffee, which is usually after a meal, I become a lot more sensitive to the environmental heat around me and my body temperature rises very rapidly. In case it is not apparent to you this just means that I am much more sensitive to movement, exertion, emotional stimulation and so on and will have a painful episode that much faster.

Now that we have covered that let us look into the combined total impact of these things on the molecular side of the house. Would it not be a safe bet that my elevated heat levels from the physical components along with the coffee consumption and that of stress from the ensuing amount of pain would naturally yield to:

Elevation in blood pressure
Increase in heart rate
Increase in reactive oxygen species production due to an increase in cellular respiration
Stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system
Increase in muscle tension
Production of adrenalin
Increased depletion of antioxidants
Increased depletion in minerals.

Is the picture becoming somewhat clear here? No I am not trying to get very scientific or complex, because it is not necessary to make the point here. What should be apparent here is that you have all of those different forms of stimulation yielding the same net output at least to a degree. It is to a degree because those different stimulants have varying influences on my state of being. What I wish to bring your attention to here is that this is a cycle that compounds upon itself until all or some of the stimulators are no longer active. Also this cycle inevitably is the precursor to your body hitting the pain switch. In case you may wonder how this is possible, keep in mind that an action potential is moving at a rate of 224 mph or so. The greater and more prolonged the stimulation the greater the output, but if you are medicated your are not likely to take immediate notice as we have discussed before, which is why it hits you like a tidal wave and leaves you scratching your head why.

However, by realizing that they play a role it shifts the importance to the list of the initiators of these things. This is what makes breaking it down fundamentally so important because as you logically influence the various stimulating factors would you not also influence the degree of the impact that they have upon you or me in this instance. I can answer that with a resounding yes. On the other hand when you are in a situation in which pain seems to spontaneously come upon you rather than being so quick to fret by fundamentally assessing the matter it will provide you with a road map to helping you to alleviate or decide if you need to evacuate before things really get bad.

We will work together to help you to achieve the state of alleviation that you desire or get as close as we can to it.

Set up your initial complementary consultation.