Chronic Pain Isn't All In The Brain

ByThe Conversation

It's not in the bones, but it might not be in the brain either. X-ray image by Shutterstock                   By Andreas Goebel, University of Liverpool:                                                                               One in five of us has been experiencing chronic pain over the past three months, or longer.

Chronic pain won’t kill us; it just makes our lives miserable. More miserable, research suggests, than for example having asthma or diabetes. So if chronic pain is a common, dismal health state, why don’t we talk more about it? Perhaps because in many cases we don’t know why we get it.
As we often don’t find a reason for this invisible conundrum, we may tend to believe that it must be all in our brains, maybe even our personality. And if you have pain you may become desperate to find a way to get your brain to drop this unnecessary folly.
So here we are, in the 21st century and every fifth person is suffering from this health problem, which we don’t understand. A health problem, which can be so debilitating that those experiencing it often stop working, stop socializing and stop doing things they like doing, or should be doing...Read More: http://www.science20.com/the_conversation/chronic_pain_isnt_all_in_the_brain-149942