I am so happy to hear you found something that worked for you and it sounds like it was a hell of a fight but that kind of intense care can be so impactful if it’s the right fit for you. It sounds not unlike a good psychiatric crisis center but more focused on treating physical symptoms that are often deeply interlinked with mental health in a way few providers treat effectively.
ultimately no two cases are the same and I feel like I’ve needed the opposite treatment in some respects. I hit a wall with PT and strength conditioning and while it’s definitely still an important part of my recovery, it seems that isolated muscle strength is not the problem, and it’s actually possible I’ve been overtraining to try to feel better. best working theory is I’m hypermobile and instinctively locking my joints to retain stability. I generally have a lack of sensation and don’t feel much direct pain, until my posture / muscle arrangement is so out of whack that I can’t function anymore.
so the work has been more focused on building bodily awareness and imporoving proprioception, and when I work out it tends to be pretty freeform and meditative and I have to aim for working out less than I want to but making the most of it. I have a provider who does specialized massage therapy combined with somatic work, and acupuncture has been an amazing low-impact way to poke into my fascial tissue and get it to chill the fuck out a bit. PTSD work and psilocybin have also been really helpful. definitely getting back to feeling more normal though I suspect it won’t ever fully go away. but I’m happy to have been forced into building up this much awareness of how my body works.
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
So basically, they torture you until you accept the pain and just take it, rather than seeking out an actual solution?
Wow, that defintively would inspire me to kill a health CEO. Or, in this case, a health theorist.
sudoshakes@reddthat.com 1 week ago
It may seem like that is the case for a bit, and often does to many patients. Myself included.
Keep in mind the target population is patients who are centralized sensitization patients. There are alpha channels of nerves that through real physical injury have created a feedback loop in the nervous system with the brain.
In these patients, who do have very real injuries, the pain levels are outside expectations for the things we can test, scan, see on imaging etc.
The mechanism is complex but essentially you can think of it as the nerve bundles of specific types are far more sensitive to stimuli and the brain becomes far more sensitive to signals received.
Breaking this feedback loop, which is often fed by avoidance of things, is important.
As for data, they have published papers in many journals with more than 20,000 patients who have been through the clinic showing progress improvement. Reductions in standard assessments for depression, improved mobility and exercise function, as well as removed reliance on medications / the polypharmacy causing underlying greater symptoms is proven in their large data set.
A lot of the mental model that has real impacts to physical symptoms revolves around breaking previously unrealized classic and operant conditioning that patients with this chronic pain sensitization often have present.
To correct and see the clear picture without clouding it, medications must be removed from the picture as polypharmacy issues can create a mess of problems that seem like they are bodily in origin but are in fact from the medication interactions.
It is a program vetted by the chronic pain treatment community for over 20 years, and the data is well reviewed, with every hour of the time a patient spends there carefully considered and measured for efficacy.
The program gets referral from many physicians in various other disciplines within and outside their hospital system for patients that meet their criteria.
To be clear, this is not a fly by night theory. It’s one of the best hospitals in the world with a program of pharmacists, doctors, PTs, nurses and supporting specialists who all meet daily per patient and make individual care plans. You seem them daily for hours a day. They monitor blood work and vitals as well as metabolic data as they taper medications. It’s deeply unpleasant but designed very intentionally to help. It does help.
Anecdotally, a patient story:
They came into the program malnourished, on a feeding tube, intense abdominal pain, GI bleeding, and on significant opiates to tackle pain levels from the GI issues.
On discharge, the patient had no expressed pain, was back to eating normally without the feeding tube, and was regaining weight . GI bleeding stopped.
6 months later they went back on pain medication from a pain physician and were right back in the ER with the same symptoms. Following the program’s instructions the same reversal took place again!
The power of the operant conditioning from taking medications when feeling symptoms is a powerful one that impacts the baseline arousal states of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. These impact all sorts of bodily processes which seem counter intuitive to apply to physical real problems, but the results speak volumes.
Everyone arrives a skeptic. I left seeing benefit in my life as a patient who these things apply to. I am not uneducated, I have created software to run clinical cancer trials for years. Yet even with that formal intellectual background I was missing things that had impact to my health condition. The average patient has less exposure to these things, and I spent 10 years seeking help for the pain before this from many physicians. Many things were tried. So all of that experience and exposure to alternative therapies and modalities to this one was brought in with skeptical critical analysis of their methods.
There is an element of trust required, and it is HARD, but the easy path of Medicare or cut it out is often not the solution with patients like us. Since pain is very much a central nervous system process, treating as such makes sense.