Chronic Back Pain Specialist Burke VA

Chronic Back Pain

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Pain and anger seem to go hand in hand. Clinical research has shown that chronic low-back pain sufferers tend to have high levels of anger and that anger exacerbates the experience of pain. Now an innovative pilot study shows that loving-kindness meditation—a Buddhist technique for fostering love and transforming anger into compassion—can help reverse the cycle.

“Basically we broke new ground in investigating a method that a lot of people have been using for thousands of years to see if it works for an average person with chronic back pain,” says Jim Carson, PhD, of the Duke University Medical Center and the study’s lead author.

The study tested an eight-week loving-kindness program for chronic low-back pain patients, who were randomly assigned to conventional care or the meditation intervention. The patients who used loving-kindness techniques showed significant improvements in their pain and psychological distress levels that correlated to the time spent practicing the meditation on any given day.

“I was somewhat surprised by how people, once they started using the methods, reported changes in their life and relationships,” Carson says. Who knows, showing a little bit of kindness and compassion may be the ultimate form of pain relief.

—Elizabeth Marglin

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