








Comments     Threshold


By psychmike on 1/2/2008 8:49:07 PM , Rating: 3
Well said. ALL pain is in your head. In serious injuries, damaged tissues or nerve send nociception signals to the brain where it is processed as brain. In chronic pain conditions, long-term physiological, nerve, or brain changes continue to process the pain signal even if the original injury has healed.

Ramachandran suggested that pain is an evolutionarily-adaptive response to protect the body from further injury. He hypothesized that in some severe chronic pain conditions, one part of the brain issues a pain response when a different part of the brain plans to initiate movement. His treatment involved use of mirror boxes so that a person could move their unafflicted limb while it looked like he was moving his afflicted limb thereby retraining the brain that (apparent) movement of the afflicted limb does not have to result in pain. His well-documented studies produced very good results and subsequent functional imaging studies confirmed that mirror-box treatment leads to re-mapping of pain-somatosensory areas of the brain.


