How a bit of yoga can help with a big health problem — chronic pain | Rachael West | TEDxBunbury

If you had your leg amputated in the 18th century, you weren't anesthetized, maybe a little wine to relieve you. By 1846, we had invented fairly effective anesthetics that would numb the

pain

during surgery, but people were still having their legs removed. without anesthesia, do you want to know why? because we thought that

pain

could bring you closer to God because we thought that good ladies could become erotically aroused if they were unconscious and do something they would regret later and because we thought that the opportunity to show you their courage and strength in the face of pain was something that no one surgeon should deny him.

It sounds ridiculous, but today what we think about pain is still as governed by our social norms and cultural beliefs as by any improved scientific knowledge. What we have today that challenges many of our beliefs is the knowledge that pain is actually an experience created by the brain. Think about the last time you felt pain, maybe you stubbed your toe or hit your thumb with a hammer. You really felt pain in your toe or thumb but actually 100% done in your brain now the pain is actually quite useful it stops you from doing stupid things so how it works you put your hand on the fire the brain says it's a little dangerous sends warning signals like pain and you Take your hand out of the fire, it's protective, but in the area of ​​pain I've dedicated the last 10 years to

chronic

or persistent pain, this pain response is not as well calibrated, your system nervous system has become sensitized so that your brain sends these warnings. signs of pain when things aren't really that dangerous, for many people this happens when pain lasts longer than expected after surgery or trauma, but for many people there is almost no apparent cause now if this is starting to sound familiar .

It really should because one in five of us experience

chronic

pain and as a country we spend thirty-four billion dollars every year in terms of direct costs, that is, we spend more on direct medical costs than on cancer, but in reality the most Part of it, about thirty-four billion dollars, is the years of disability and lost work hours of people with ongoing pain. Now, if the first thing you think about when you're in pain is that you'd take painkillers, you'll be surprised at how ineffective they are. I have been prescribing opioids more frequently, according to information from Pain Australia, it has an average 30% reduction in pain, usually with negative side effects and of course with that small

problem

of the risk of addiction plus our beliefs that pain always equals tissue damage.

It's making us resort to a lot of scans and tests that are not

help

ful and can actually make the pain worse because they worry us, so it sounds pretty terrible, but there is some very good news and that is that if your brain can change to feel more pain you can change your brain to feel less pain and the best way for

health

care right now to do that is through a multidisciplinary approach, so you'll have access to a doctor, physiotherapist, psychologist, maybe a rehab counselor and a dietitian to

help

you with the psychological physical. and behavioral aspects of pain, so they will check that there is nothing wrong with you that we need to worry about.

They will teach you skills to turn down the dimmer switch so your pain begins to reduce and provide you with skills such as mindfulness. and stick your activities throughout the day so that you can at least maintain your quality of life, but there are three really big challenges with this approach. The first is that we will usually only have these types of expert services in a community, town or city that is large enough to support it and that means that if you live in a rural area or outside of an urban center you will probably have to travel and if you are in pain, a long trip will probably make your pain worse.

The second

problem

. is that when it comes to pain, early intervention is important, while waiting lists for public hospitals can be over 12 months, plus people go to the pain clinic and then leave and don't actually practice skills necessarily long enough to get any benefit, so friends I am here today to tell you about a solution that has worked for me and many others. They can do it at home. They can do it in the psychic. They can do it in the field. Friends, I'm here to tell you. They can do it in. the town hall or your park will help you with the physical aspects of pain, the psychological aspects and even those annoying habits that make your pain worse, does that sound good?

Do you want to know what caused it? I was going to say

yoga

,

yoga

can help with your experience of pain through its combined effect on your body, your mind and your perception of the world. I had pain all over my body for about ten years in my teens and 20s. I would wake up in the morning feeling like I had been hit by a bus. I suspect it was brought on by glandular fever and stress in my teens, but I don't really know. Epigenetics tells us that some of us are predisposed and something happens. Triggered pains maybe, but anyway at 20 I felt like my body was falling apart.

The doctors had scanned every part of me. They couldn't find anything wrong, so they gave me vitamins and actually a bunch of really good strategies to help me calm down, but they could only take me so far with the rest. It's up to me, so as you've probably guessed, I had a yoga practice that I had to adapt considerably to my new ability, but over time my practice allowed me to get to know my body again and, kids, to get to know myself and which meant I would eventually run away to the circus, so in 2010 I'm hanging from a trapeze wearing a pink boa singing cows with guns and looking at this big church in Sheffield at this audience and thinking to myself God Rachel, you've just raised up a woman on your head and you did it by sleeping four hours.

I think you're better, that's true, I said to myself, but did you know that many people in pain are still told that the best thing they can do is manage, that's terrible, I said maybe we could do something about it, yes, we should to let everyone know that they can run away to the circus if they want, so I was going to change the world and help everyone who wanted to run away to the circus, metaphorically speaking, to do so. So I ran away to France to study a degree in yogic education with Madame Marie and booking this degree helps me learn how to make yoga accessible to diverse populations.

In particular, it taught me the value of keeping yoga as yoga, without trying to blur it. I'm not trying to confuse it with

health

care because it's different and take my personal experience and develop it into a coherent framework that will eventually become a yoga course for people with persistent pain. So I tell you how we were taking the framework of yoga informed by medical information and using it to improve the lives of people who need it. I'm going to take you to a very old Texas called the Yoga Sutras. The Yoga Sutras were written at least 2,000 years ago, so it's the real deal and I think you'll find this helpful, especially if you're getting your yoga education on Instagram, but the Yoga Sutras tell us that our yoga practice has eight limbs. , so the yoga pose we're most familiar with thanks to Instagram is limb number three. and this gives you physical education, so specifically for someone in pain we need to rebuild those pathways between the brain and the body, but also learn to move with less tension that might have arisen because of the fear that something is really wrong with your breathing. pranayama. it works on the nervous system and for people in pain we need to calm the nervous system so that it does not respond to everything as a danger that leads us to pratyahara from withdrawal, where we are not affected as much by external stimuli, so think of someone in pain . where their nervous system tells them that everything around them is dangerous, which then leads us to Dharana concentration, the mind in pain is often anxious and then meditation and this stage called Samadhi which we often call happiness, but Let me take you to the first two branches. of this eight member framework because these are the ones that I think are really important but less talked about and they are the Yama and the jnanis and these are some guidelines on how to be with ourselves and be with others now because I want Everyone can get out of here and impress their friends over Friday night drinks with their knowledge of yogic philosophy and Sanskrit.

I'm going to talk to you about two of them, so the two I want to talk to are our anthems or not- do harm and so much truthfulness that they sound pretty simple you don't tell lies you don't hurt people you're honest with yourself we need to be really practical what they mean these concepts in practice and so with someone in pain I want to allow them to move without making their pain worse, but for many people that is not even something they can conceive. Start with your truthfulness. Am I being honest with myself about how much I do today to not do too much, but also that?

I don't do too little or stop when it's really time to make progress, when you have pain or illness your whole world changes and this philosophical contemplation allows you to examine some of the beliefs you have about your body and your life and try Discover some new and Thanks to this, you know this practice. We now have a lot of research showing that regular yoga practice can, in fact, reduce pain, including related symptoms such as fatigue and anxiety, including the level of stress, the stress hormone cortisol, which often is high when you have chronic pain so with this evidence now doctors are sending it out sometimes it seems like everyone who has pain goes to yoga which is really cool right we can all do yoga to save the world but a lot of people with the same conditions as Research says that yoga can help us practice yoga and it doesn't change things for them, in fact, some of them say, Rachel, I went to restorative yoga and it made my pain worse and I see three interrelated reasons why This happens, first of all, to us.

By sending people to yoga as a last resort, their nervous systems are so sensitized and their sense of hope so diminished that they don't do it regularly enough to get any of the benefits, so clearly we can improve the way we offer yoga . a modality of pain care, but I also realize that those three problems are the same ones that healthcare professionals face every day with their patients in pain. For the healthcare system as a whole, we are spending more and more on pain and yet as many people as ever will. Pain will get worse as our population ages, so I realized that to do something that would really make a difference the difference, we would have to involve the health profession and provide something that was not just a solution for pain on a psychophysical level, but I helped with this larger socioeconomic challenge that is ear pain and that is why I started bring together yoga teachers and health professionals not to work together but to learn together and through that they can offer pain-sensitive yoga in their communities, which means that people don't have to drive across town or across the town to get some kind of care, they have almost immediate access to some pretty good pain management strategies, and more importantly, it's a normal, enjoyable activity that encourages you to do it often enough to make the kind of progress .

That makes more progress possible, but what's really exciting about all of this is actually the kind of learning that's taking place because when we have our different fields engendered by size, it makes us question our beliefs and challenge what we think about pain. and the best. What needs to be done to really make a difference in the world is that the partnerships and knowledge sharing that occurs between these professionals means that they can work nimbly with very specific local communities in a way that a large system simply cannot. back pain at age 60 I have different needs than kids with arthritis we can't go to school there the programs for these different groups will have a time and place and we don't need to spend billions implementing them across the country but to that community at that moment that program will be what allows them to move forward thank you