Become Your Own
Best Healer

elcome to the online learning program for Reversing Chronic Pain. If you are reading this introduction, I’m guessing that you want additional help in reversing your pain condition. You may have been suffering for years from debilitating pain. Maybe your pain stems from multiple causes… an injury, a surgery gone wrong, perhaps an autoimmune illness such as fibromyalgia or rheumatoid arthritis, or maybe a structural problem that you were born with. Or maybe you aren’t sure about the causes because the pain keeps moving around and changing.

It’s normal to feel despair. Pain that keeps persisting and perhaps becomes worse over time creates a lot of those feelings. It’s natural that you are looking for a “miracle” way out of the agony, one that involves little energy because you don’t feel you have any energy left. Your body wants you to run away and hide from the pain, yet your mind recognizes that that’s not the answer either. Maybe you’ve all but given up hope. Don’t. Not without trying this program first. You may have tried everything else that has been suggested to you. But you haven’t tried this. Is it worth 10 minutes of your time to try out the program absolutely free of charge? If you answered even a tentative yes to this question, please read on.

Why Try the RCP Online Program?

This program is special because it applies the latest online learning technology to create a multi-dimensional learning experience. It is designed to be used as a companion teaching tool to my book, Reversing Chronic Pain. Therefore, you may get the best results from putting together a comprehensive program that combines each book chapter with an individual learning module.  Each module includes video and audio clips to help you apply the tools from the book and adds new information and techniques not included in the book. In short, participating in this learning program is the next best thing to sitting with me in my office.

If you were meeting with me in person, we would evaluate your pain condition in terms of its history, your responses to past treatments, and review all of the techniques discussed in the Reversing Chronic Pain learning program to determine a good place to start. Together, we would set some initial goals designed to deliver the biggest results in the shortest time with the least effort from you. When the inevitable challenges arose, we would modify the methods we were trying out, and continue to adjust each approach until it was in a form that could unlock your unique mind-body potentials to give us the results both of us want you to have.

With this online program, you will be able to have a similar interaction with me and with the tools I have found to be most powerful with persistent and chronic pain conditions. You will have the opportunity to experience the best of online learning that has already been piloted successfully with people in pain, to build on your learning from the Reversing Chronic Pain book, to watch me teach the skills live on video, and to listen to audio aids that help you master the skills and integrate them as I would if you were sitting in the room with me. Pairing the book’s information with this online tutorial may bring you the best of both programs, but you also have the opportunity to try each format separately.

What makes me believe that you can succeed with the Reversing Chronic Pain learning program even if nothing else has really worked for you? First, there are the endorsements of many professionals who also work with pain conditions, as well as those of pain clients who have been successful in using the RCP program. If you haven’t taken time to read these supportive comments, please take time to read them now by clicking here

The Advantages of Alternative Treatment

Before you decide whether you are ready to participate in the Reversing Chronic Pain online program, it might be a good idea to remind yourself why an alternative pain treatment program may be right for you.

Since 1993, research has documented the popularity of alternative medicine. In a study published that year in The New England Journal of Medicine, the authors determined that 1 out of 3 Americans were utilizing alternative medicine. By 1998, that percentage had increased to one out of two, and researchers documented that more Americans visited alternative practitioners than traditional ones. Those numbers have continued to increase exponentially in each calendar year since.

Why have millions of Americans turned to alternative methods for healthcare? By and large, it appears that this trend has developed to find solutions to our epidemic pain problem. Although modern medicine has extended our life expectancies, it has not been able to cure many painful health conditions such as arthritis and cancer. So, we find ourselves living longer, often in pain.

Do alternative methods work? Often they do, but it’s important to remember that no one method works for everyone in pain. So whether it’s magnet therapy, reiki, acupuncture, Pilates, meditation, or homeopathy, just to mention a few possibilities, it’s important to find the combination of traditional and alternative approaches to pain that will really work for YOU.

The benefit of the Reversing Chronic Pain program is that if offers you a combination of approaches that do not cost money beyond the use of the book and the tutorials, and are completely natural, without the risk of side effects that medications often have. The tools are completely portable and require no previous study. You can practice these methods wherever you travel in your day and in your life. I wish I could predict which ones will work best for you, but I’m afraid that is something that only you can discover yourself through open-minded exploration.

Fortunately, there are guidelines that can help, and that’s what the RCP online program provides you. Each module contains up to date information that stretches beyond the book, along with audio and video guides to help you apply the methods more effectively, and opportunities to chart your progress in a journal, either on your computer or in a separate book that you use every day. Because this program is multi-modal (that is, it combines multiple approaches in ways that can boost the effects of each one), you have the advantage of making many choices on your own behalf, and of changing those decisions and intentions based on the results you are getting, so that you develop a fluid, flexible program that fits your ever-changing needs. You will also learn how to track your responses to the multiple methods you will be trying out so that you can determine what is working best, and what does not seem to be helping you get the results that you want.

You may want to make use of the additional resources that accompany each learning module, including suggested books, links to numerous other websites, podcasts and radio interviews. You may also find it helpful to consult the ongoing blog posted on
this website, where I will share information that is even more current than the
learning modules. The discussion board may be a good support so that you can share your discoveries, learn from other participants, and find companionship on your
journey 24/7.

Most of all, I hope you will find daily inspiration to help you come home to your body. Pain is one of the greatest challenges to our acceptance of embodiment in this life. Yet bringing ourselves back into our bodies is necessary for the practice of fully grateful, joyous living. When we do this, we allow healing power to flow through us, and appreciate our full aliveness as the greatest gift we have. For more inspiration to help you feel at home in your body, go to www.gratefulness.org/t/body.htm. And now, click here to learn how you can participate in RCP online.

As good as this program is, it will not help you to the maximum level if you are unable to become an active, open-minded participant. Essentially, you need to become your own best healer. You’ve probably had experiences with medical professionals that have been frustrating or marginally helpful. Even if you’ve worked with the best, they may not have known how to help you or been able to pinpoint why their treatments did not deliver the best results possible for you. After a few of these encounters, it’s hard to get your hopes up about a new approach. You may not have enough energy for anything except crawling through another painful day. More than anything, you want to stop hurting, and you aren’t sure where to turn to get what you need. When everyone around you seems to have given up on you, it’s very difficult not to give up on yourself.

The Biology of Hope

Did you know that there is actually a biology of hope? Dr. Jerome Groopman, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a staff writer in medicine and biology for The New Yorker magazine. He has also written several books, including The Anatomy of Hope, published in 2004. The information that follows is excerpted from a speech prepared by Dr. Groopman on this topic in October, 2003.

Dr. Groopman shared that through his experience with patients, he'd come to believe that “giving a patient hope was as important as any prescription I might write or any procedure I might perform.” He began a serious quest to understand how to distinguish true hope from false hope, whether a person should ever relinquish the right to hope, how what we hope for might change during the course of an illness, and, most important, whether there was an authentic biology to hope.

Early on, he was a major skeptic, turned off by new-age claims, such as the belief that meditation can help your pancreatic cancer go into remission, or that positive thinking can boost your immune system and bring your HIV condition under control. Yet Groopman also realized that if there is a biology of fear, a biology of anger, and a biology of depression and other emotional states, there must be a biology of hope.

He began by asking himself what he had learned from his patients. He believed that the core of medicine was to create circumstances where hope could flourish as the belief that the actions each person can take can bring a future different from the present.
One of Dr. Groopman’s greatest lessons came from one of his physician mentors, who specialized in the treatment of stomach cancer. When this colleague himself was diagnosed with stomach cancer that had already metastasized, he insisted on fighting the cancer aggressively even though he had only a 1% - 3% chance of living as long as 12 months. He not only surpassed that benchmark, but went into remission and lived a long and healthy life. It turned out that Groopman’s colleague was well aware of the odds against him, but because he wanted so much to live, he decided that he must fight with a full arsenal of every possible treatment. The kind of hope his story illustrates is the hope that fuels determination and the strength to fight illness and health imbalance, hope and strength to sustain the battle, and the will to prevail. Such a full-on assault is not for everyone, but it is important that you know that it is a workable option.

The biology of hope is rooted in the placebo effect, which depends on belief and expectation. Dr. Groopman cites studies conducted on pain by Fabrizio Benedetti in Italy. Researchers inflated blood pressure cuffs around the arm of volunteers and bring it up high enough to create a measurable pain stimulus. The volunteer is medicated with a low dose of morphine, which helps to reduce the pain. Then as the procedure is continued, patients are told that they are receiving more morphine; instead, however, they receive saline. Most volunteers report a dramatic drop in pain levels. This occurs because the placebo effect, created by the belief that the morphine will help, releases endorphins and enkephalins that diminish the pain response in the brain.

Similar studies in asthma look at the positive effects of belief and expectation on respiration and the opening of bronchi. And, a study on Parkinson's disease that appeared in Science, examined patients with moderate Parkinson's disease. Patients in the research group were given a drug that released the drug dopamine and, of course, they had more voluntary muscle movement. Then the same patients were given a placebo but they believed they were receiving the dopamine drug again. What happened? A large number of patients got better with the placebo. Their belief and expectation caused the same pathways in the brain to release dopamine. Hope in this way improved them in an objectively measured way.

One of the scientists investigating this area is an experimental neuropsychologist named Richard Davidson. A rigorous scientist, Davidson sees hope as having two components: one a cognitive component and the other an emotional component. To have true hope means to have information that allows you to meticulously examine everything in a given health situation--all the obstacles, all the pitfalls--and then find that path that can bring you to the future. That's the cognitive part. The second part is the affective part. We talk about wings of hope, or being uplifted by hope. There is an energizing feeling that we experience with hope. Davidson and other scientists now are trying to develop experimental methods to assess the biological impact of that energizing feeling, of that uplifting sense on cortisol levels, catecholine levels, and other important physiological parameters.

So the hope in the Reversing Chronic Pain learning program is to provide you the kind of experiences that will feed your beliefs related to hope and help you discover the uplifting feelings of hope as well.

How is Now Different From Any Other Time in Your Life?

One of the first things a careful clinician does is to take a thorough history of your pain--when it started, what happened to make it worse, your current diagnoses, what you know and believe about your pain, the medical options you’ve been given for treatment, and what has helped reduce your sense of pain.

You may not know that the real hope for reversing your pain condition can be found in your own past experiences as well as in your current attitudes and beliefs. When I listen to pain clients describe the history as described above, I listen closely for the ways they have propelled themselves forward as well as the obstacles that have derailed their progress. This information may be outside of their awareness and is important to consider at a full level of consciousness.

One way you might begin to explore these ideas is to ask yourself, “How is this time in my life different from all other times that have come before now? What made me consider the Reversing Chronic Pain learning program right now? Which part of me has been nudging me in this direction even though I’m not sure anything will work?” You may want to pause here, and spend a few minutes answering these questions honestly because the answers that come may well be a part of your biology of hope.

Now, I’d like to invite you to think about the different decisions you have made during the course of your pain. These may give you further clues about what has helped you to move forward in your recovery from pain and what may have held you back. Consider the following example.

Jerry

Jerry began working with me to resolve his chronic back pain stemming from several herniated discs. Part of my preliminary evaluation involved asking him to make a list of the major decisions he had made related to his pain condition. He listed the following:

1. My Dad and grandfather both had back problems. Growing up, I was really good at sports. I could have excelled in football, basketball, or soccer. Instead I played baseball because I thought I might not be as likely to hurt my back. I liked baseball but I didn’t really love it.

2. When I had just graduated from college, I was riding with one of my fraternity buddies back home from a party. I didn’t know that my friend who was driving had had too much to drink. He lost control of the car and we rolled off the road. My friend was critically injured, and I suffered serious whiplash, which triggered a lot of neck and lower back pain. I went to a well known chiropractor, which helped a little bit, and tried acupuncture, which helped a little bit more, but not enough. I began to really feel scared that I was going to relive what had happened to my father and his father, who both became semi-invalids in their later lives. I kept going to see doctors, who all recommended something different. Finally, I found a physical therapist who himself had a back injury, and he gave me some excellent exercises to try. It was hard work, but finally I felt I had found something that I could do that made a difference.

3. When I was in my 30’s, I pulled my hamstring when I slipped and fell playing coed softball. Even though I didn’t feel much pain afterward, my back started acting up again. I began to worry that I couldn’t/shouldn’t exercise or I’d make things worse. I stopped playing softball, I felt very depressed, and I started limping around feeling about 90 years old. My wife was upset that I felt so bad and was withdrawing from her. She wanted me to go see a therapist, but I felt so defective, I was afraid I’d feel worse. Finally, when it seemed like my marriage might be on the rocks, I did go to see a psychiatrist and started on antidepressants. I have to admit they helped me, the pain got better, and I became more active. Yet I never returned to the level of physical activity I had experienced before the injury. I still feel bad about that.

4. By the time I was 40, I had been promoted to more of a desk job, where I spent long hours typing at my computer. I liked the work, but I started developing tendonitis in my wrists and arms and was afraid I would end up with carpal tunnel syndrome. The back pain returned, and I felt very depressed again. This time the antidepressants didn’t really help that much. I started going into a downward spiral. What saved me was a friend at work, who had been through similar problems. He talked to me about having a more positive attitude, and he checked in with me every day to see how I was doing. I guess the support really helped, because I finally pulled out of my slump. My company installed an ergonomically balanced computer table, and I went to the osteopath that my friend recommended, who was able to help me with both my arms and my back. My friend Dave also got me involved in a Big Brothers program; together we coached a basketball team for that group, and I began to feel better again.

5. That brings us to the present time. I came to see you because I realized in the last few months that I was avoiding playing sports with my two sons in our backyard. They really love it but it seems to aggravate my back. I’m only 51 years old, and I don’t want to end up like my father, sitting in my recliner watching TV and not able to connect the way I want to with my boys.

When Jerry and I looked at these “stepping stones” that had brought him to his current decision to work with me, we were able to see several important patterns: a) His anxiety about repeating history had been present throughout his life and had never been treated; b) taking charge of his own health needs with the physical therapy exercises had really paid off; c) social support from his friend Dave had made all the difference at work; and d) structure really seemed to help Jerry in the form of the PT exercises and the Big Brothers program.

Once we identified these factors, we were able to construct a plan for using the Reversing Chronic Pain program that would meet his needs. I told him that the focus of his treatment right now needed to be self-treatment, where he would commit to working daily with the RCP tools that seemed to make the most positive difference in his pain levels in a structured, sequential way. Secondly, he would need to expand his base of social support, perhaps finding a men’s group where he could get encouragement for his desires to be an active Dad. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we decided to work on his conflicts about ending up like his male family members, as these worries might be likely to block our efforts.

Jerry was able to execute our plan to reduce his pain significantly (from an average rating of 8 out of 10 to a liveable 2-3). Even if your situation seems to be nothing like Jerry’s, you can still benefit from identifying your own stepping stones.

Stepping Stones Exercise

Take a few minutes now to type out or write down the 5-7 major decisions you have made related to your pain condition and its origins. Consider all types of pain, including emotional and physical pain, and follow this thread through your entire lifespan. Once you have listed these decision points, go back and consider how each has served as a “stepping stone” to lead you to your current place in life.  How has each served as a “stepping stone” for you? What patterns do you see? How can you use the RCP program to plan to address these issues? You might want to use the following format:

Now, please click here to learn how you can participate in RCP online.