Is Your Nerve Pain Worse Than Mine?

Today's post from neuropathyjournal.org (see link below) talks about why some people seem to do better with chronic pain than others. It's an age-old subject: women for instance have long claimed that they can bear pain much better than men (probably rooted in the pains of child birth) but there's no indisputable evidence to show this is true. When it comes to neuropathy, everybody's pain is different because everybody has an individual form or strength of neuropathy which determines how much pain, or other symptoms they have to live with, so of course, some bear it better than others because it's literally less or more painful. Nevertheless, neuropathy emerges as one of those conditions that can push people beyond the 10 on the pain scale and despite this, can lead to stigma and accusations of exaggeration. It's also one of those diseases that can come and go which confuses onlookers looking for consistency to measure their reactions against. For that reason it's a rotten disease because outwardly people with neuropathy can look as healthy as the next person. It takes patience on both sides to understand what someone is going through. People go on and on about pain thresholds but with neuropathy, everybody's pain threshold is unique to themselves - it makes it difficult for both patient and doctor to appreciate the other's point of view. This article covers the subject in an objective manner - worth a read.

Why Some Cope Better with Chronic Pain
By LtCol Eugene B Richardson, USA (Retired) BA, MDiv, EdM, MS0 

NOTE: The science in this article is based upon a review of, “The Brain” by Carl Zimmer, Award Winning Biology writer, June 2011 issue of DISCOVER Magazine. It is highly recommended that you read this great article.

There are no medical tools, stethoscopes or thermometers, to measure or determine objectively if a neuropathy patient has chronic pain.

While measurable, observable, objectivity is the hallmark of modern science, to many times what drives treatment, testing and payment approvals by medical insurance is the observable. The neuropathy patient lives in a world of subjective symptoms until measurable damage is done to the axon (nerve) or the covering to the nerve (myelin).

Neuropathic pain can occur for years or even decades before there is measurable damage to the peripheral nerves. (Read One Man’s Journey with Neuropathy). The reality as recently confirmed by the medical experts in the Journal of the Peripheral Nervous System – such measurable nerve damage can take years to happen. Meanwhile the neuropathy patient suffers alone from some unknown underlying pain from a disease or condition, too often dismissed by doctors.

Patients are trying their best to cope with the problems moving limbs in a motor neuropathy or the chronic pain that accompanies many sensory or disturbance to many internal systems as in autonomic neuropathies and sometimes all three. It is easy for the doctors no having the necessary tools for diagnosis and faced with the demands of objective information, to dismiss the patient or diagnose with the diagnosis of somatization.

Now you may have heard the brag. “I have better pain tolerance than you!” Or, “You must have little tolerance for pain.” Or worse, “You have a low tolerance for pain and I deal better with pain than you do.”

The implications are that there is something wrong with you and something superior about them. Such comments hurt and all too often afflict more psychological pain on top of the physical pain and damage that is being done to the brain by chronic pain.

The truth is there is something right with you, but it is not what these braggers think or imply with such unhelpful insensitive comments.

True, the experience of pain is personal and complex. Each of us for a variety of reasons experience pain differently.

Yet science knows that the person with “tightly linked neurons” experience more pain. So you can always say that you are more tightly wrapped, but this will probably go over their heads.

There are physical and psychological reasons why each of us reacts differently to pain and pain medications. This is why partnering with the doctor to find what works for you is so important. (Read Partnering with the Doctor).

That being said, there is something right with you as research of the brain reveals high levels of the enzyme AC1 increases chronic pain.

To any patient living with chronic pain, you do not need to explain what neuroscientist researchers now know about chronic (lasts more than 60 days) pain and how over time, under treated pain actually causes concrete psychological changes in the brain. We now know that patients actually begin to lose gray matter and some of us do not have a lot of it to give away!

Yet the exciting promise behind this discovery of enzyme AC1 is the related testing of NB001 in animals, a compound which attaches itself to AC1 preventing the “neuronal activity that makes chronic pain possible.”

The results are so promising that human trials are planned in the near future.

Whether this compound will continue to show promise in the more complex world of humans remains to be seen, but the road to “where chronic pain lives” has been unveiled.

The promise that science will eventually find a solution for the many patients suffering with chronic neuropathic pain, pain that is beyond the understanding of anyone except the patient experiencing such pain, has moved ever closer.

This is why we must support neuropathy research and more training in the clinical diagnosis and treatment of all neuropathies.

https://neuropathyjournal.org/why-some-cope-better-with-chronic-pain/