Amy Orr - Taming Chronic Pain: A Management Guide for a More Enjoyable Life

Praise for Taming Chronic Pain

Clear, engaging, and with the authenticity of personal ex perience.

Patricia Morley-Forster, MD, FRCPC
Professor Emerita, Western University
Former Director of Pain Management Program at Western University
Former Medical Director of Pain Managemen t Program
at St Joesph s Hospital
2013 Canadian Anesthesiologists Society Gold Me dal Winner

I would recommend this book to all chronic pain sufferers, family members, and doctors involved in managing chro nic pain.

Laxmaiah Manchikanti, MD, founder of Pain Physician

An essential handbook for anyone who has to manage pain at some point in their life. And isnt that everyone?

Dr. Linda Clever, author of The Fatigue Pr escription

In this practical and empowering guide, Amy Orr offers hands-on strategies and insights that combine the wisdom and empathy of someone who has lived with pain with the clear-eyed precision of a skilled writer. Taming Chronic Pain is a concise yet comprehensive toolkit for living withand moving beyondchro nic pain.

Laurie Edwards, author of Life Disr upted and
In the Kingdom o f the Sick
www.laurieedwards writer.com

Amy Orr has written a clear and persuasive primer on what it means to live with chronic pain. With a light, breezy style, she gives realistic advice on how to manage pain. No quack cures here; no shady fixes. Instead, youll find useful tips on everything from how to talk to your doctor to knowing when to be weird (youll understand when you read the book!). Relevant not only for people living with chronic pain, but also for those whose loved ones live in pain.

Peter A. Ubel MD Professor of Medicine, Public Policy and Business Duke University Author of Sick to Debt (Ya le, 2019)
and Critical Decisions (Harp erCollins)

In Taming Chronic Pain , Amy Orr sets out to offer guidance and support to chronic pain patients in virtually every aspect of their lives, and she succeeds in her mission masterfully. As she writes: You are not your body but you are in your body, so its your job to take care of it. Orr helps every patient to do exactly thatsensibly, purposefully, and with optimism and good humor. She is frank in offering her advice or expertise, but without being preachy or didactic. Readers will come away feeling they have found a friend and valued advisor. I highly recommend Taming Chronic Pain and know that pain patients will benefit from reading it in many, many ways in their present and into thei r future.

Joy H Selak PhD Author of You Dont LOOK Sick! Living Well with Invisible Chronic Illness with Dr. Stev en Overman

Taming
Chronic
Pain

A Management Guide
for a More Enjoyable Life

Amy Orr

Mango Publishing
Co ral Gables

Copyright 2019 by Amy Orr.

Published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

Cover Design: Roberto Nez

Layout & Design: Roberto Nez

Illustrations by Jules Hall

Jules Hall is a Graphic Designer in Kitchener-Waterloo, where she lives with her partner and two cats. This book is close to her heart as she lives with chronic illness. If youre interested in seeing more of her work, visit juleshall.ca.

Mango is an active supporter of authors rights to free speech and artistic expression in their books. The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to produce exceptional works that enrich our culture and our open society.

Uploading or distributing photos, scans or any content from this book without prior permission is theft of the authors intellectual property. Please honor the authors work as you would your own. Thank you in advance for respecting our authors rights.

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Coral Gables, FL 33134 USA

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Taming Chronic Pain: A Management Guide for a More Enjoyable Life

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2019941780

ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-037-0, (ebook) 978-1-64250-038-7

BISAC category code: HEALTH & FITNESS / Pain Management

Printed in the United States of America

For little Amy.

The hardest lessons are learned with time.

Table of Contents

Exercise:
Connect with Your Pharmacist

Exercise:
Simple Meditation Practices

Exercise:
Rating Therapies

Exercise:
Clearly Observe Your Own System

Exercise:
Find a Support Group

Exercise:
Prioritize Your Future

I was in the middle of a career as an anesthesiologist at a university teaching hospital in southwestern Ontario when I decided to go back to school. I wanted to learn more about chronic pain. I had been an obstetric anesthesiologist, relieving labor pain, and had also dealt with post-surgical pain in recovery and on the surgical floors. Surgical pain is acute pain. Doctors and nurses expect, understand, and know how to deal with acute pain. Usually what works for one patient after a certain surgery will work well to treat others after a similar surgery, with minor variations. But the world of chronic pain is very different, one problem being that what works for one person with a chronic pain condition might not work at all for someone with the same diagnosis. And the patients life situation, mood, and past experience with pain are important in working toward pai n control.

When I first started working in chronic pain clinics, I was struck by the lack of knowledge, scarcity of research, and general misconceptions around the condition of chronic pain. Here was a problem that one in five people in the United States and Canada suffer from, yet doctors-to-be received almost no training in it at any time in their undergraduate or postgradu ate years.

Different medical specialties often held opposing views on how to assess and treat chronic pain. How could a patient experiencing the confusion, fatigue, and life-changing experience of chronic pain make sense of their problem if even their doctors couldnt? It is so multi-faceted and affects virtually every aspect of life, work, and relationships. Collaborative multi-disciplinary care for the patient, and education for the providers, seemed to make the most sense. Different approaches will appeal to differe nt people.

Doctors do not come off well in Taming Chronic Pain , this recounting of author Amy Orrs journey of discovering how to live well with her chronic pain. I am happy to say that, in the past ten years, education in pain management has become mandatory in most Canadian and American medical schools. There is even a path to certification in the specialty of Pain Medicine now in Canada, as well as several other countries. In the future, I hope that patients reporting ongoing pain to their doctor will meet with fewer confused looks, and more understanding, than Amy did in her medica l journey.

I was very pleased to be invited to write the foreword for this book. I first met Amy in 2014 when I was the medical director of the Multi-Disciplinary Pain Program at St. Josephs Health Care in London, Ontario. To Amy, a curious person both by nature and training, this encounter was a revelation. The diagnosis gave a medical name to her sense of feeling broken, and set her on the path to discovering everything she could about her condition. She has spent the last few years writing Taming Chronic Pain to explain all she has learned to others who are still trying to make sense of their own ex periences.

It is unusual to find a book on chronic pain written by one who experiences it daily. When that person is also a writer and a scientist, the voice speaks confidently to a wide audience. This is not a book describing all current research on various pain disorders. It is a self-guided tour through the multiple aspects of causation, therapy, and self-awareness that an individual with chronic pain needs to understand in order to help t hemselves.