Pain
Chronic Pain and Pain Reprocessing Therapy
Nobody wants to experience pain.
Once you have it, you want to get rid of it as quickly as possible.
When we live with pain for a long time, it can change our sense of "who we are." It changes the way we see the world and how we relate to it.
We often don't have good answers as to why we are in pain or what to do about it, which makes it even harder.
Pain is invisible, but it can affect every aspect of our lives.
Pain & Neuroplastic pain
Recent research has shown that chronic back pain, neck pain, complaints of fibromyalgia, CANS (we used to call this RSI), headaches and many other forms of chronic pain are often not the result of structural causes or "damage" in the body, but of psychophysiological causes. processes that can be reversed. This is also called neuroplastic pain.
Pain is an alarm signal. When we injure ourselves, the body normally sends signals from the body to the brain to notify us of tissue damage, and we feel pain. Very useful!
But in some cases our brains make a mistake. Neuroplastic pain occurs because the brain misinterprets safe messages from the body as if they were dangerous.
In other words, neuroplastic pain is a false alarm.
Although the pain can be addressed psychologically, this does not mean that the pain is imaginary or “in our head”. Various studies show activity in pain on brain scans. This is also visible in neuroplastic pain. However, where pain complaints last longer than would be expected, this brain activity is visible in a different part of our brain. The part that is more concerned with "giving meaning to", with learning processes and emotion.
Recent research has shown that pain is often the result of "learned neural pathways in the brain." And just as pain can be learned, it can also be unlearned! The wonder of neuroplasticity.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy
"Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) is a treatment method that uses psychological techniques to retrain the brain to correctly interpret and respond to signals from the body, ultimately breaking the cycle of chronic pain. So this is what it's all about. Not just about pain management, but reducing or even eliminating existing pain complaints!
Pain Reprocessing Therapy consists of 5 main components:
1. Psychoeducation:
Learning to better understand how pain works can help enormously in our experience of pain! Learn how your brain interprets pain and how you can train your brain to reduce it.
2. Collecting evidence about your complaints
Gathering personal evidence regarding neuroplastic pain and how your brain influences the pain you experience and how your brain can subsequently change to alleviate pain.
3. Seeing and experiencing the pain sensations through a safe lens
We will work with exercises to learn to interpret these sensations in a different and safe way.
4. Other emotional "components" in focus
We address emotional factors that may contribute to your pain experience.
5. The shift in focus to positive feelings and sensations
Shift to positive emotions and sensations to support healing.
The Boulder study
A randomized controlled trial at the University of Colorado Boulder validated Pain Reprocessing Therapy as the most effective current treatment for chronic pain.
In the study there were 100 patients with chronic back pain. Half of them received PRT twice a week for four weeks, half received the usual treatment. In the PRT group, 98% of patients improved and 66% of patients were pain-free or almost pain-free at the end of treatment.
These results were largely maintained a year later.
A follow-up analysis of the study shows that PRT significantly reduces pain intensity and fear-avoidance behavior.
​
Read the PDF document herestudy.
PRT at PHYSI.YOGA
I offer Pain Reprocessing Therapy both in my practice in The Hague and online.
During the first intake appointment we will discuss the complaints in detail and investigate them together.
In subsequent follow-up appointments we will discuss this further, discuss pain education and psycho-education and, among other things, work with PRT techniques, such as Somatic Tracking.
While you may be used to a physiotherapist often working manually, this is not the case with Pain Reprocessing Therapy, and there will be no manual treatments applied.
If you first want to learn more about Pain Reprocessing Therapy, I highly recommend the book "The Way Out", by Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv. There are also various podcasts that talk about PRT.
​
If you would like to discuss Pain Reprocessing Therapy by telephone and whether this would be something for you, please feel free to contact me.
​
​
Pain Reprocessing Therapy
The"small print":
​- All appointments are with Christel Hendriks at the Van Diemenstraat location or online
- For information regarding possible partial reimbursement from additional physiotherapy insurance, please contact me.