The 7 Approaches To Pain Management

More Than One Way To Kill Pain

This is Dr. Deepak Ravindran (MD, FRCA. FFPMRCA, EDRA. FIPP, DMSMed). He has decades of experience and is a specialist in acute and chronic pain management, anesthesia, musculoskeletal medicine, and lifestyle medicine.

A quick catch-up, first:

We’ve written about chronic pain management before:

Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)

As well as:

Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief

Dr. Ravindran’s approach

Dr. Ravindran takes a “trauma-informed care” approach to his professional practice, and recommends the same for others.

In a nutshell, this means starting from a position of not “what’s wrong with you?”, but rather “what happened to you?”.

This seemingly subtle shift is important, because it means actually dealing with a person’s issues, instead of “take one of these and call my secretary next month”. Read more:

What is Trauma-Informed Care?

Pain itself can be something of a many-headed hydra. Dr. Ravindran’s approach is equally many-headed; specifically, he has a 7-point plan:

Medications

Dr. Ravindran sees painkillers (and a collection of other drugs, like antidepressants and muscle relaxants) as a potential means to an end worth exploring, but he doesn’t expect them to be the best choice for everyone, and nor does he expect them to be a cure-all. Neither should we. He also advises being mindful of the drawbacks and potential complications of these drugs, too.

Interventions

Sometimes, surgery is the right choice. Sometimes it isn’t. Often, it will change a life—one way or the other. Similar to with medications, Dr. Ravindran is very averse to a “one size fits all” approach here. See also:

The Insider’s Guide To Making Hospital As Comfortable As Possible

Neuroscience and stress management

Often a lot of the distress of pain is not just the pain itself, but the fear associated with it. Will it get worse if I move wrong or eat the wrong thing? How long will it last? Will it ever get better? Will it get worse if I do nothing?. Dr. Ravindran advises tackling this, with the same level of importance as the pain itself. Here’s a good start:

Stress, And Building Psychological Resilience

Diet and the microbiome

Many chronic illnesses are heavily influenced by this, and Dr. Ravindran’s respect for lifestyle medicine comes into play here. While diet might not fix all our ills, it certainly can stop things from being a lot worse. Beyond the obvious “eat healthily” (Mediterranean diet being a good starting point for most people), he also advises doing elimination tests where appropriate, to screen out potential flare-up triggers. You also might consider:

Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean Diet

Sleep

“Get good sleep” is easy advice for those who are not in agonizing pain that sometimes gets worse from staying in the same position for too long. Nevertheless, it is important, and foundational to good health. So it’s important to explore—whatever limitations one might realistically have—what can be done to improve it.

If you can only sleep for a short while at a time, you may get benefit from this previous main feature of ours:

How To Nap Like A Pro (No More “Sleep Hangovers”!)

Exercise and movement

The trick here is to move little and often; without overdoing it, but without permitting loss of mobility either. See also:

The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less, And Move More

Therapies of the mind and body

This is about taking a holistic approach to one’s wellness. In Dr. Ravindran’s words:

❝Mind-body therapies are often an extremely sensitive topic about which people hold very strong opinions and sometimes irrational beliefs.

Some, like reiki and spiritual therapy and homeopathy, have hardly any scientific evidence to back them up, while others like yoga, hypnosis, and meditation/mindfulness are mainstream techniques with many studies showing the benefits, but they all work for certain patients.❞

In other words: evidence-based is surely the best starting point, but if you feel inclined to try something else and it works for you, then it works for you. And that’s a win.

Want to know more?

You might like his book…

The Pain-Free Mindset: 7 Steps to Taking Control and Overcoming Chronic Pain

He also has a blog and a podcast.

Take care!