Dr. Brian Blick knows chronic pain cannot be treated with medication alone
Pharmacological treatment helps to relieve pain, but according to Dr Brian Blick, the most important thing is to include all the areas that can enhance or favor it. Promoting all those actions that can improve your lifestyle and reorder, restructure, or improve your central nervous system is essential.
The central nervous system is constantly changing; neuronal plasticity allows changes to be made when, for example, we change lifestyles. That is why it is important to eat a healthy diet, exercise, avoid any emotional or physical stress that can increase pain, not smoke, and avoid alcohol.
All this serves to try to reorder the brain and make chronic pain much more bearable, clarifies Dr. Brian Blick. He explains that mental health professionals can help patients improve their expectations, cope, accept pain, and seek self-help tools for better pain control.
Furthermore, he explains how people in different cultures have different pain experiences. Back pain, for example, is a much more frequent phenomenon in industrialized countries and practically non-existent in countries with fewer economic resources. This is influenced by economic, environmental, social, and cultural factors.
It teaches you how to behave around pain
If cultural, economic, and environmental factors affect pain perception, experts agree that emotions also play a fundamental role. Pain depends a lot on our mood, explains Dr. Brian Blick.
When we are happy, we have less pain than when we are sad or stressed, have little sleep, or feel lonely. We must also remember that we learn how to behave concerning pain throughout our lives.
Treatments under various approaches
Regarding treatment, Dr. Brian Blick knows chronic pain cannot be treated with medication alone. We need it, and several types can be used, but they do not play a fundamental role in these cases, as was previously believed.
Maybe in the future, we will have better medicines that go to the root of the pain and are more personalized, but right now, we have learned from many studies that many more tools are needed.