Marc S. Micozzi - Overcoming Acute and Chronic Pain: Keys to Treatment Based on Your Emotional Type

Overcoming Acute and Chronic Pain

Overcoming Acute and Chronic Pain is one of the best books in its field to emerge in recent years. It breaks new groundchoosing a pain therapy based not just on ones medical diagnosis but also on ones emotional patterns. As Micozzi and Dibra show, this approach can have an enormous impact on a therapys effectiveness. If you or a loved one suffers from acute or chronic pain, or if you are a medical professional who deals with such, please pay attention to the wisdom of this important book.

LARRY DOSSEY, M.D., AUTHOR OF ONE MIND: HOW OUR INDIVIDUAL MIND IS PART OF A GREATER CONSCIOUSNESS AND WHY IT MATTERS

This book is full of well-researched solutions that are helpful, healing, non-addicting, and get to the core of the issue, creating better health and relief for those that implement these time-tested solutions.

BRIGITTE MARS, AUTHOR OF ADDICTION-FREE NATURALLY AND THE SEXUAL HERBAL

PRAISE FOR
YOUR EMOTIONAL TYPE
by Marc S. Micozzi, M.D., Ph.D.,
and Michael A. Jawer

The book is empowering, helping us to become active agents in our healing rather than being simply the recipients of cures from a medical approach that fails to recognize the uniqueness of individuals.

GABOR MAT, M.D., AUTHOR OF WHEN THE BODY SAYS NO: EXPLORING THE STRESS-DISEASE CONNECTION

... offers a valuable framework for helping people choose among the array of complementary and alternative therapies.

DEANE JUHAN, AUTHOR OF JOBS BODY: A HANDBOOK FOR BODYWORK

Your Emotional Type is a wake-up call for those who are stuck in stubborn emotional prisons of fear, anger, resentment, regret, and self-destruction.

SPIRITUALITY & PRACTICE

Acknowledgments

Marc Micozzi would like to acknowledge his colleague Michael Jawer for his years of work applying the personality boundary and emotional psychometric types to the various mind-body conditions considered in this book, as well as in previous books that we coauthored: Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion and Your Emotional Type.

In addition, both authors wish to acknowledge Denise Rodgers for her early original insights into many of the connections and continuities among various mind-body therapies; Marty Rossman for his pioneering work, case histories, and contributions over many years to the field and practice of guided imagery therapy; and the late David Larson for his original work and promotion of the study of prayer, religious practice, and spirituality in healing. We are grateful to Dan Redwood for his decades of work in education and research on spinal manual therapy and chiropractic and to Judith Walker Delany for her contributions to massage as a medical therapy and health and wellness practice. We give special recognition to Kevin Ergil and Marnae Ergil for their unique and comprehensive knowledge, perspectives, and contributions in classical Chinese medicine and acupuncture and to Caroline Hoffman and Rhiannon Lewis for their steadfast work, contributions, teachings, and overall leadership on the health benefits of aromatherapy and essential oils therapy. We acknowledge science journalist Charles Seife for his explanation of the principles of matter and antimatter that embody the infinite universe, as well as the neuroscientists at the University of Oxford, England, for their significant contributions to the neuroscience community. In early 2015, these Oxford researchers discovered the location of a pain center in the brain that becomes active based on how much pain a person perceives.

Thank you to our editors at Inner Traditions, Meghan MacLean and Margaret Jones, for going above and beyond. And thank you to Jon Graham and Ehud Sperling for having faith in our continued vision for helping people by using the emotional boundary types.

Finally, we acknowledge the team of gifted young writers and editors at Omni Vista Health for assistance in keeping up with all the latest, groundbreaking scientific developments that offer promising, innovative natural approaches for pain.

PREFACE

Taking a Natural Approach to Pain

While most of the mind-body pain disorders addressed in this book are poorly understood and poorly treated by Western medical care, they account for a huge amount of daily distress, discomfort, and disability. And these conditions are often chronic. Chronic diseases are those that are prolonged, do not resolve spontaneously, and are rarely cured completely. The rarity of complete cures in conventional medicine is related to the incompleteness of the old twentieth-century medical model of disease.

In 2003 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that chronic diseases affect almost 100 million Americans and account for one-third of the years of potential life lost before the age of sixty-five. The financial burden of treating chronic diseases now accounts for almost two-thirds of the total medical care costs in the United States.

Complementary and alternative (or integrative) medicine, or CAM, defines a broad category of interventions, such as the mind-body modalities described in this book, that have not been taught widely at U.S. medical schools or generally available at U.S. hospitals. Nevertheless, in the twenty-first century, almost half of the adult population in the United States is already using CAM to help manage chronic diseases.

There has been growing awareness in recent years that one of the major motivations for learning, seeking, and applying what has been called natural medicine, which we see as synonymous with CAM, is to address the prodigious problem of pain. In fact, the medical textbook Fundamentals of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (now in its sixth edition), written and edited by half of this author team, Marc Micozzi, has been the most requested book at the annual meetings of the American Association for Pain Management, although this basic text is a foundational survey of CAM approaches for health care professionals and is not especially focused on pain. This new book for health care consumers attempts to do just that; it has been written on the basis of information available from a multitude of medical and scientific literature, with the consumer foremost in mind. The dimensions and parameters of the pain problem have expanded dramatically over the past twenty years because of the aging population that is facing new challenges with respect to pain, including the looming use, misuse, and abuse of both legal pain medications and illegal drugs. The overwhelming implications for public health, law enforcement, and public policy have become evident across the county and worldwide. In my (Micozzi speaking here) former practice of forensic medicine, I encountered many cases of death from drug overdose (usually pain drugs). These overdoses were intentional (suicide), accidental, and occasionally homicidal. From an insurance standpoint, the main concern was determining not the manner of death, but whether the levels of drugs detected were consistent with the prescribed dosages.

Meanwhile, there have been large shifts in the accepted paradigm for health and healing when it comes to elucidating and understanding the bioenergetic model and the consciousness dimension of human health. In some places, medical practice is incorporating CAM under the rubric of so-called integrative medicine. In terms of this integration, the patient is confronted with a bewildering array of different CAM therapies from over twenty different major healing traditions, ranging from single, simple techniques to entire systems of medical practice and health care.