How does chronic pain affect a person emotionally?
We can't distinguish the somatic part, meaning the physical or the body part, from the mental part or the spiritual part. We have to look at all of those things in treating a person. When a person has chronic pain, they often become depressed. When a person is depressed they often experience more chronic pain. So there's many things that we have to look at to deal with the entire person and the word holistically comes up for me because that means that we're dealing with the whole person. We're not looking at a person's hangnail or a person's knee or at a person's pain from an appendicitis that could be chronic, causing abdominal pain, we're looking really at the person and what it is that is affecting their life in many ways. We know that stress causes chronic pain. So when people come in the office that I've had here before, when a patient comes in and I haven't seen them for quite some time, some of the first questions I'll ask are: "Have you just been travelling?" Stress. "Have you broken up with a spouse?" Stress. "Have you had a problem on your job?" Stress. "Are there financial issues going on?" Stress. And when people have an exacerbation of something and it's been inactive for quite some time, meaning that the pain has gotten much worse after it was much better for a while, they will usually have a life incident that takes place that affects their consciousness negatively in such a way that they feel a lot of anxiety and stress from it. And that will affect that part of the body that's sort of like their weak spot.
