Taking those in response to pain created a classical conditioning response in central dentition patients and are to be avoided.

One of the lessons from the chronic pain clinic at Mayo Hospital I learned was how to get friends and family to interact with you as a chronic pain sufferer.

A lot of what we were focusing on while in the chronic pain program was to prevent ourselves from classical conditioning ourselves with pain behaviors. Preventing that signaling can also be useful for friends and family. Paradoxically, the most empathetic thing you can do is to not acknowledge pain but to focus in on progress, process, and future plans.

You can both make it clear you wish to help, and that you don’t wish to treat them like the sum of their symptoms instead of a person.

It will vary in nuance for every person, which is why you sit down and talk to them about what is the best way ahownup for them. Unfortunately many patients have not had the 3 weeks of 8 hour days in the hospital getting the best possible cognitive behavioral therapy for chronic pain that I did, and what they ask for may be maladaptive.

It’s so difficult to be both your own advocate and temper natural desires with what NEEDS to be done. I would say almost impossible to navigate without professional help. If someone is going through that chronic pain, the best thing would be to gently guide them to professional resources for it. After that, the patient can more reliably give adaptive advocacy for themselves.

Chronic pain is so difficult.

There are no words in any language to sufficiently communicate how difficult it is.

It is post operative surgery waking up in agony levels of pain, every day, forever.

It breaks you mentally. It stunts your activity levels. It robs you of patience and kindness.

It is torture, performed by no one, where you would do anything to make it stop. Anything.

Being a compassionate, energy giving, productive, and present person in the lives of others whilst carrying the invisible caustic agony of chronic pain is a sysaphean task the is harder every degeneratively waking day.

Doing the right things (2 hours of PT and exercises every day, cognitive behavioral therapeutic techniques, biofeedback tools, purposefully doing what is painful to prevent classic conditioning avoidance, and no medication for pain) is so fucking hard. Every single day.

There is no vacation. There is no rest.

8 people now have more than 53% of the world combined.