Researchers at The University of Manchester have discovered that arthritis pain, unlike that induced as part of an experiment, is processed in the parts of the brain concerned with emotions and fear.So repeated pain trains you. It causes your experience of pain to be more painful. Which is a good thing since it will tend to reduce the stress on the areas in pain. The more it hurts the less you use it.
"We thought that arthritic and acute experimental pain would be processed within the same areas of the pain matrix," Dr Kulkarni continued. "But, although both activated both the medial and lateral pain systems, arthritic pain prompted increased activity in the cingulate cortex, thalamus and amygdale within the medial system - the areas concerned with processing fear, emotions and aversive conditioning.This I is very important because I think fear, if it reaches a high enough level, is experienced as pain. On top of that it is likely that extreme fear memories can be experienced as pain as well.
"This suggests that arthritic pain has more emotional salience than experimental pain for these patients, which is consistent with the unpleasantness scores they themselves gave. The increased activity in the areas associated with aversive conditioning, reward and fear, which are less commonly activated during experimental pain, suggests they might be processing fear of further injury and disability associated with the arthritic pain."
Which points out something another study looks at. Fear memories are at the heart of PTSD as I discussed in PTSD and the Endocannabinoid System. One of the keys tying this all together is this study: Fear memories, the amygdala, and the CB1 receptor. It turns out that cannabinoids are a part of this signaling mechanism and that the strength of the signal is in part genetically determined.
All this corroborates what I have been saying for years. The idea that "drugs cause addiction" is superstition. People in chronic pain chronically take drugs for pain relief. It doesn't matter if the pain is from a broken bone or rape memories. The same drugs work to provide relief.
The drug war is a persecution of people in pain.
Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values
6 comments:
A very interesting post, Matt, and a very interesting perspective. Is your thesis here that there is no such thing as addiction?
I have some thoughts on pain as well. I suspect that much back pain is also found in the "fear center" of the brain.
A few years ago I began to experience extreme back pain. I was diagnosed with a herniated disc. My MRI showed that my disc herniation was six millimeters. My Dr. looked at my MRI and wondered aloud how I could walk considering that the spinal constriction was so bad at one point on my spine that he "couldn't see my spinal cord."
Surgery was recommended.
I talked with many people about disc herniations and spinal surgery. From what I could tell there was little correlation between surgery and actually recovering from disc herniation. That is to say those who recovered were just as likely to have done nothing but exercise and therapy, and those who didn't recover were just as likely to have had surgery.
I opted for therapy and exercise.
It took over two years to recover, but I am now able to jog and lift weights again, and my body is actually in better shape now in my mid-forties, than it was in my late-thirties.
Anyway, the point is, the success of my recovery was aided by a book called Healing Back Pain by John Sarno. Sarno's thesis is that back pain is "all in the mind." I don't know that I wholly agree with him. However, it did become clear to me that, after a period of time, much of my back pain was, indeed, in my mind.
That is to say, I believe my brain was trained to experience pain, and I believe my body reacted to the pain experienced by constricting blood flow and tightening muscles in a certain way, which thus INCREASED THE FUCKING PAIN.
I discovered this one day when I was standing in line at Starbuck's. The line was interminable, and I wondered to myslef how I was going to make it. I felt like I needed to lie down. Instead, I concentrated on relaxing and breathing meditatively. I discovered that I was standing in a very odd position with my hips pushed forward a bit and my lower back tightened. This position tended to make my back feel better when I would first move into it, but it increased the pain over time.
So, I determined to stand in a relaxed manner instead, with my feet squarely under my shoulders, chest forward, etc. I found that standing in this position (more akin to military "at ease") gave me great relief over time. It was more painful in the short run, but less painful over time.
I had to literally retrain my body how to walk, stand, sit, and lie. I learned that my body had adapted all sorts of short term solutions to extreme pain, but all of these short term solutions increased pain over time, and thus contributed to the pain.
Think about how when a person hits his thumb with a hammer. What does he do? His body constricts, he closes his eyes, and yells. Closing one's eyes actually always has the result of increasing pain, if you really think about it (it's a matter of what you are focusing on), yet it is our natural reaction to pain. Likewise, constricting muscles seems to produce the longterm result of increasing pain. Short term, the constriction of muscles brings blood flow to the area, but it also produces swelling which throws the movement muscles out of alignment, which increases pain. A kind of downward spiral happens, unless one takes the steps to overcome the pain.
I have never experienced arthtitic pain, but I can imagine it must be terrible. I am not against meds, but I shy away from them. My doctor offered me all sorts of fun pain meds. I refused them and suffered out of fear of becoming addicted. Today I am almost completely pain free and I have never taken a pain med. I fear that if I would have begun taking the pain meds, I would never have gone through the process of recovery, and would instead be addicted to meds today.
Anyway, that's my experience. I don't know if it adds to the discussion or not. I have found pain to be a mysterious phenomenon.
By the way, the reason I referred to you as Matt is that I used to have a friend named Matt Simon, so whenever I see your name, I always see it as Matt.
I have no idea what your full name is. My bad.
The M. is how my dad used to sign his name. We have different first names but of course the same first initial.
To all my friends I'm Simon (a carry over from my Navy days). Even my first mate calls me Simon (together for 33 years so far).
Yes. No such thing as addiction. There is habituation which we know how to cure: detox. Some people crave drugs after detox. That is addiction and in my opinion is wholly correlated to pain. I'm sure given the wide range of human possibilities there may be some exceptiions. I would expect pain (and genetics) to explain at least 90% of addiction. Note that genetics already explains about 50% according to the NIDA.
So humans have a lot of difficulty letting go of their pain. Rolfing deals with pain embeded in how you hold yourself.
I had never heard of Rolfing before. Thanks for letting me know.
On the subject of pain and addiction, are there any other writers writing on this subject from your perspective?
Mark, I wish there were more people like you!
That is, I wish more people would have the kind of intelligence and mindset that would enable them to recognize the massive and ought-to-be-obvious connections between the largely chronically coursing and insidiously co-motivating "conditioned-in" neural aftermath of adverse environmental challenges that are physically unavoidable or inescapable and that will be maladaptively responded to (as if by default) unless they can be responded to by way of (what I partly because of my perverse penchant for serious philosophical punning refer to as) "specific/synaptic hibernation".
The acronym that I have derived in order to have a more meaningful-than-usual name to call such neural imprints, is CURSES. (It is just the shortest possible version of a name that demands to be pronounced "curses" - just how I think such imprints deserve to be labeled.)
For now I will only insinuatively (and introductively) say that, by “specific/synaptic hibernation” I refer to a very precisely (or selectively) “actention payment” preventing capability of an “actention selection serving system” (~= the CNS).
That is, specific/synaptic hibernation is effected by neural mechanisms whereby we can selectively prevent “a mental and/or emotional (or feeling) consciousnessT” and “a 'motor type' activity or ditto preoccupation" in response to a pre-perceptively (sensorially) detected actual and/or potential emotional and/or physical injury.
Hence, by “specific/synaptic hibernation” I refer to a function on which our individual survival, and of course often also people's reproductive survival often depends; as did, very often, the survival of our evolutionary progenitors - to be sure!
Apropos the T-tag on “consciousnessT”:
This is how I sometimes flag that the word consciousness is meant by me in a wide yet pragmatically constrained 'EPT-specific' way.
[Here is something about what I refer to/intend/mean by EPT:
I have had the temerity to contrived a few terms or “tools” for science-aligned, and 'excEPTionally' explanatory, philosophical thinking.
There is a whole heap of other characterizations (that I find fitting or acceptable) that “warrants” that I insinuatingly and/or qualifyingly refer to my effectively (or almost entirely) philosophy terminating (or at least fairly finalizing) philosophical thinking, and to its highly informal textual representation, as “EPT”; and, by an elegant and perfectly tactful modification of the spelling suitable words, I can flag a by me intended special (unconventional) meaning, such as exemplified by the thus qualified meaning of “inEPT”, in-dEPTh, accEPTable, etcetera.
I have managed to arrive at EPT partly (but importantly) through
1. MAD [Mutually Assured Destruction]-inspired error plagued trials;
2. by diligently acquiring and applying a by Jacob Bronowski coined and from Heisenberg's “Uncertainty Principle” extrapolated (and by me only slightly further extrapolated) “Principle of Tolerance-based" (thus intellect tempering) attitude [or “tolerance principled” alt. “tolerance principle employing” attitude]; and
3. by resorting to “sem_antics” (not exluding puerile punning).
These by me textually approximated “tools for thought” or “lingual lenses” were constructed with the aim to achieve an etymological embodiment of elastic properties that supplement likewise built-in protective, corrective, and correlative concEPTual qualities. For example, some of the EPT terms that are acronyms are flexible or fuzzy constructs due to having alternative, but in the end equivalent enough, “internal” word-components.
Moreover “EPT terms” are the means whereby I have learned (taught myself) to look at (including from some rarely utilized angels) and have achieved an encompassing (yet precise and - believe me! ;-> - totally non-trivial) philosophical take on (or far-firmer-than-gnostic grasp on) aspects of What Is (and has been) going on.
Finally, it so happens that EPT is relevant to your blogging agenda.]
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“Specific/synaptic hibernation” still more precisely explained:
By specific/synaptic hibernation I refer to a (synaptic blocking/gating/inhibitory) function that by defintion is required to be available, and to be induced “to do its thing”, in any neuromuscular animal when, specifically, an individual is (or has happend to have gotten into) a “specific/synaptic hibernation “imploring” (figuratively phrased thus) type predicament" or, IOW, an environmental source of sensory stimulation that threatens to become a positively overloading ordeal or a (psycho)physiologically overtaxing, or potentially overly onerous, situation.
That is, specific/synaptic hibernation (or ~ "pain gating") is something that begs to be automatically induced or become activated within an ASSS whenever we get into a SHI-type (for short) predicament.
Specific/synaptic hibernation depends on functions that very similar (perhaps in parts identical) to but not general in its scope the way that general hibernation (or hibernation as conventionally loosely meant); the common denominator being that both general and specific hibernation is a matter of (a very generally versus a very precisely behavior-blocking/consciousnessT-canceling self-regulatory muting (dampening) by an individual of its own metabolism.
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“SHI-type” predicaments normally leave behind (within the actention selection serving system of individuals of just about any neuromuscular species) what may collectively or quite specifically be described as (something along the lines of) "'conditioned-in' and chronically kept 'hibernated' (inhibited/gated) unconsciously reverberating, stressors (no longer environmental effected but insidiously endogenous in character), effecting symptoms.
However, I risk a bet on that such symptoms are most significant (from most murderously to most magnificently manifest) in the case of our own species.
The shortest meaningful abbreviation of this kind (and EPT category) of imprints is “CURSES”.
The most important 'encompassing political task' that can be undertaken in this world is to use EPT insights or Extensively Primal Theory-aligned guidelines to as far as possible minimize the prevalence and imprinting of CURSES by the implementation of profylactic policies (or reforms).
This means that, as a rule, the effectiveness of such policies/reforms can be assessed both by counting the total number of SHI-type predicaments gotten into by people during the most formative and most vulnerable (to getting into such predicaments) period of our lives, and by checking for the presence of CURSES (-type brain states) in a population.
“Specific hibernation” is EPTly meant in the sense of a function (or adaptation) that is "metabolism muting" of post-synaptic neurons. Via CURSES (that survived SHI-type predicaments normally cause) both "selective unconsciousness" and rerouted actention-motivating signals (i.e. more or less distinctly thus misconnected and thus to more or less abstract or symbolic symptoms rerouted signals) become important “actention selecting” factors within the actention selection serving system.
Hence, it is EPT to conclude that the in "brainspacetime" consciousnessT-energizing functural aspect of an actention selection serving system (ASSS) - no matter what transmitters, individual neurons, or neural circuits are central or crucial for whatever kind or specific content of consciousnessT (whether innate or acquired) or preoccupation (or “focus of actention”) is transiently dominant within an ASSS at any one time, the complex lifelong process that in real-time selects our actentions [does so frequently and regularly in the case of the very most vital ones such as e.g. our breathing and heartbeat; or does possibly and luckily never select and activate those innate latently murderous actention module amongst the innate modules of an individual's entire repertoire of potentially paid actention modules].
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SHI-type predicaments (or ordeals belonging to the same particular subset of the "adversity side" of the didactic dichotomy of the Evolutionary Pressure Totality) and their normally automatically conditioned-in aftermath, i.e. CURSES, constitute a to us humans frequently troublesome aspect of What Is (and has been) going on approximately ever since the 'evolutionary arrival' of our neuromuscular ancestors.
More precisely, naturally (including socially) caused "specific/synaptic hibernation imploring" type predicaments leave chronically "gated" dynamic imprints in "actention selection serving systems"; and these imprints automatically get as if (or surely in many cases literally) "rerouted" to begin to insidiously motivate actentions such as otherwise not predominantly energized (and acted-out), or hardly at all otherwise activated, actention modules that are specific to all kinds of behavioral or attitudinal addictions as well as of course 'classic' drug addictions in this world.
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Unfortunately, there are far too few of us that understand all this in sufficient dEPTh.
That is, understand our uniquely AEVASIVE characteristics.
AEVASIVE is a concEPT (and EPT term ) that refers both to how our species was natural selected and to how it is always naturally determined - including closer in time than much of our phylogeny and in real-time - what we transiently pay actention to (centrally by help of the ASSS).
Yours only decEPTively joking,
"Bef" %]
One makeshift correction.
There is a need to do emergency surgery on at least one paragraph in my previous post.
Consequently I have inserted and replaced with "is a", as follows.
"Hence, it is EPT to conclude that the in "brainspacetime" consciousnessT-energizing functural aspect of an actention selection serving system (ASSS) - no matter what transmitters, individual neurons, or neural circuits are central or crucial for whatever kind or specific content of consciousnessT (whether innate or acquired) or preoccupation (or “focus of actention”) is transiently dominant within an ASSS at any one time, is a complex lifelong process...." [etc].
Can't be bothered with trying to make compensating corrections to any more messy parts of my original message.
Apologies to you Mark (and most of all myself) for having prematurely posted a not Copiously Righted response.
"Bef"
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