@Bob I recall when you and I spoke, you mentioned how when pain is sometimes chronic, and it is overcome, other pains begin manifesting. If I recall you mentioned an idea of a “pain beacon.”
Could you elaborate on that? I am recovering from chronic pain and noticing more aches and pains that weren’t evident before, and wondering about what you had said.
Thank you so much!
P.S. I ordered a P9 and am excited about its potential especially for men who may be suffering from erectile dysfunction.
The concept of “inflammation beacon” is something I developed over the course of more than a decade, based on my work with clinicians, super-users of ICES-PEMF, and neurophysiologists. The concept is based on two different aspects of the physiology of pain.
First, pain is processed on the brain cortex using a focusing process called “lateral inhibition”. This allows the brain to focus on whatever is most important, and mainly ignore the rest. The practical result is that the brain focuses on its primary, largest pain signal, and the other pain signals get turned down so you feel them less.
The other physiological mechanism is that local cytokines if present chronically can eventually cause systemic inflammatory effects, far from the initial and chronic injury. So, localized inflammation from a chronic injury can eventually cause systemic inflammation, even if it is at a lower level of inflammation farther from the initial injury.
Taken together, this means that a local injury that never really heals can eventually cause inflammation far from the location of the initial injury. These areas can therefore also become painful, but generally less so than the initial injury.
The strange sensory effect happens when you reduce the inflammation at the initial injury site. The pain there is reduced, so the lower pain signals at farther locations moves into the foreground of your consciousness. The key is that the other pain signals were always there, but they were suppressed in the cortex of the brain by lateral inhibition from the much larger pain signal from the initial injury.
This makes it feel like once you manage to reduce the pain at your initial injury, gee whiz, all of a sudden everything else everywhere else hurts. At that moment, some people view PEMF as harmful to them and discontinue using it, even though it is really working for them and they just have the temporary illusion of more widespread pain. But typically the feeling of more widespread pain subsides with continued use of the PEMF, especially if you can continue to use it on the initial injury, which, counter-intuitively, may not even be painful anymore, for about 1-2 weeks.
When the initial injury finally heals, and the inflammation at that site subsides, then it “quenches the inflammatory beacon”; it is no longer sending out pro-inflammatory signals throughout the body. So, the aches and pains far from the initial injury become less inflammed and therefore less painful, just by fully treating the initial injury.
Hint: for this reason, you don’t need to try to chase these other aches and pains around with PEMF. Mainly you want to keep using PEMF on the initial injury, even after it stops being painful (for about an additional 2 weeks), to allow the tissue to fully recover and prevent future inflammation.
thank you so much for clarifying @Bob
I’m trying a cognitive technique for my headaches. I had read about Dr. Moskowitz in The Brain That Changes Itself, the Norman Doidge book, and chased his method down.
I had gotten a tremendous amount of training under Dr. Les Fehmi, the brilliant late psychiatrist who pioneered neurofeedback, but the method never really helped me with the headaches.
I think for all pain we get really good at “paining”. Our neural networks build bigger and bigger around feeling pain.
The cognitive method basically recruits those neural networks by basically fantasizing and those neurons begin to move from paining to fantasizing.
The fantasy is a visualization and I think it can be really anything.
I think Dr. Fehmi’s method worked this way too even though he didn’t really connect the method with this idea.
I think all chronic pain probably requires this type of resolution but it does require commitment and there is no pill to take.
Meanwhile I find the PEMF coils help a lot with the ancillary pains that I’m getting.
I really agree. We learn to be in a condition of constant pain. This happens to me.
The usefulness of PEMF is that it really does give you a tool to fight real pain from real injuries and inflammation. I don’t believe that is the type of pain that anyone can just “think away”. So, we need help to overcome the initial, real, chronic injury.
But once that injury is reduced or eliminated, sometimes we have just learned to be in pain. So, the pain continues even after the injury is gone.
This is the phase when the pain is mainly or entirely a construct of the mind, based on a memory of real pain, and the neural adaptation to being in a state of constant pain. This is where mental focus, breath control, visualization, et al., become very useful and effective.
Curious if anyone has experience with hypnosis? Exploring this path via a GI doctor recommending it for IBS D for a family member.
Does anything that upregulates detox ability (like NAC + Glycine or S Acetyl Glutathione) help with head aches?
Glycine and NAC are very helpful for preventing infection but I’m not seeing anything that has helped headaches in the long run, of the tension type.
Curious where are the headaches? Do they seem to be at the surface on the forehead, corner of an eye, temples or other location? Or more deeper in the head?
left temple for me…
Ok, so what works for me likely won’t work for you. However, I will share what works for me. I put M1 double stacked coils Alpha power 15 right over the left temple spot and I have found within 1-3 hours, the headache goes away. I also instinctively want to do deep massage of the temple (pushing my finger through the open coils) and that seems to help too. Hoping you find some relief soon.
doesn’t work for me but I’m glad it is working for you @taj
Hi Realthing - I never checked out this thread until now. Interesting discussion between you and Bob. What really caught my attention was that you had trained with Les Fehmi. I trained with him many many years ago and it was one of the very best things I ever did for myself. I could not however achieve what he could with chronic pain. I would say that his Open Focus approach helped me in a general way with pain, discomfort, and all kinds of bad feelings but while it definitely improved my sense of well being, it never dramatically took away pain for me. The exception to that is that his Open Focus is an amazing technique for sudden acute pain like banging your shin or cutting yourself in preparing food. I learned to switch from my “instinctive” narrow focusing on the pain (gripping the pain so to speak) to spreading my focus broadly as soon as the pain started. That pretty much took care of most injuries that would generally hurt a few seconds to several minutes. If I say broke a bone I couldn’t keep that pain away though I’d say it helped reduce the overall trauma. Anyway good to hear from someone else who experienced Dr Fehmi’s work.
Amazing. Dr. Fehmi’s methods are something that I use frequently but they didn’t fix my headaches. I did use a cognitive method more recently that has made them much better. I agree Open Focus helps acute pain more than chronic pain better. A sad day when he passed.