Reading Can Ease Chronic Pain

 

If you suffer from chronic pain, read a book. Researchers from the University of Liverpool found that reading has similar effects on the brain as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

The study, which was published in the BMJ Journal for Medical Humanities, compared “shared reading” to CBT as a treatment for chronic pain.

Chronic pain is a pain that last for more than six months, and is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage.

Normally, pain is picked up by specialized cells in the body, and impulses are sent through the nervous system to the brain. In chronic pain, however, other nerves are recruited into this “pain” pathway and begin firing off messages to the brain when there is no physical stimulus or damage.

The pathways can become normal again by drugs that block nerves, and by CBT, which trains the brain to send new messages to the body.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is a talking therapy that can help you manage your problems by changing the ways you think and behave. It’s most commonly used to treat anxiety and depression, but can be useful for other mental and physical health problems.

Recent research found that CBT is effective in relieving chronic pain, but its benefits are limited and short-lived.

“Shared reading” is often used to help people whose problems are similar to those with chronic pain in that the problem is often chronic and unsolvable, such as those in prison or suffering from severe mental illness.

In shared reading, small groups of people meet weekly to read literature. The participants pause regularly to discuss thoughts on the reading material, or how it relates to their own lives.

For the new study, participants with severe chronic pain were recruited. One group participated in a five-week CBT problem, while the shared reading group meet for 22 weeks. The CBT group members joined the shared reading group after completing CBT.

Researchers found that reading and sharing literature had similar effects on the brain. While CBT allowed patients to recall pain and share their experience with other participants, reading allowed patients to become consciously aware of the emotional pain caused by their condition. Reading and sharing their feelings also triggered the recall of positive memories from the past before they suffered from chronic pain, and sending new pain-free messages back to the brain.

“Our study indicated that shared reading could potentially be an alternative to CBT in bringing into conscious awareness areas of emotional pain otherwise passively suffered by chronic pain patients,” said Dr. Josie Billington.

“The encouragement of greater confrontation and tolerance of emotional difficulty that ‘sharing reading’ provides makes it valuable as a longer-term follow-up or adjunct to CBT’s concentration on short-term management of emotion.”

Meditation has also been found to be more effective than drugs to ease chronic back pain. Scientists at Seattle’s Group Health Research Institute found that eight weekly sessions of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), such as meditation and yoga, relieved pain and improved ease of movement better than conventional care, such as over-the-counter pain killers. Cognitive behavior therapy, which taught people to change the way they felt about pain, also helped improve both pain and ease of movement better than conventional care.

According to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain.