2020-05-31, 05:47 AM
100 million Americans have chronic pain. Very few use one of the best tools to treat it.
Chronic pain often has no physical cause. Psychotherapy can reduce the suffering.
Chronic pain often has no physical cause. Psychotherapy can reduce the suffering.
Quote:Like many patients with chronic pain, Golson never got a concrete diagnosis. For a decade, the 38-year-old Californian went from doctor to doctor, trying all the standard treatments: opioids, hand splints, cortisone injections, epidural injections, exercises, even elective surgery.
Golson’s pain was not caused by anything physically wrong with him. But it wasn’t imagined. It was real.
After weaning himself off the opioid Vicodin and feeling like he had exhausted every medical option, Golson turned to a book that described how pain could be purely psychological in origin. That ultimately took a pain psychologist, a therapist who specializes in pain — not a physician — to treat the true source: his fearful thoughts. Realizing that psychological therapy could help “was one of the most profoundly surprising experiences of my life,” Golson says. No doctor he ever saw “even hinted my pain might be psychogenic,” meaning pain that’s psychological in origin.
Golson was lucky; few chronic pain patients ever get the chance to understand the psychological dimensions of their pain or try psychological therapies.