Recently Diagnosed or Relapsed? Stop Looking For a Miracle Cure, and Use Evidence-Based Therapies To Enhance Your Treatment and Prolong Your Remission
Multiple Myeloma an incurable disease, but I have spent the last 25 years in remission using a blend of conventional oncology and evidence-based nutrition, supplementation, and lifestyle therapies from peer-reviewed studies that your oncologist probably hasn't told you about.
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Myeloma Survivors w/ Chronic Pain
Myeloma survivors with chronic pain are a subset of what the study below is referring to. But a growing subset. Meaning, add the growing number of Americans suffering from chronic pain to the growing number of MM survivors and you come up with MM survivors who need relief from their chronic pain.
To be clear, I’m not talking about the pain MM patients experience caused by MM symptoms like bone pain. I’m talking about the pain that MM survivors can experience long after their diagnosis and initial treatment.
Managing Chronic Pain-
As a MM survivor living with chronic pain myself, think the four key takeaways from this study are:
- Like bone or kidney health, learning about chronic pain helps-
- Chronic pain treatments are multi-factorial- meaning MM survivors must utilize both conventional and non-conventional therapies-
- Your overall health and body weight can exacerbate chronic pain-
- Chronic pain is both mind and body-
Those chronic pain therapies that I find most helpful day-in, day-out are:
- Moderate exercise (walking, stretching, etc.)
- Acupuncture Therapy
- Chiropractic Therapy
- CBD oil (no THC)-
- Massage-
- Deep breathing-
Email me David.PeopleBeatingCancer@gmail.com with questions about your chronic pain.
Hang in there,
David Emerson
- MM Survivor
- MM Cancer Coach
- Director PeopleBeatingCancer
More Americans Than Ever Suffer From Chronic Pain
“More Americans than ever are hurting with enduring, life-restricting pain. Like obesity, this condition is on the rise, according to figures in a new National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Data Brief from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In 2023, 24.3% of US adults had chronic pain, and 8.5% had high-impact chronic pain (HICP) that frequently limited daily activities in the past 3 months. Both types increased with age and with decreasing urbanization level. Women were more likely than men to have HICP (23.2% vs 7.3%).
Like obesity, chronic pain is multifactorial and is best managed with multidisciplinary intervention, said Jianguo Cheng, MD, PhD, a professor of anesthesiology and medical director of the Cleveland Clinic Consortium for Pain, Cleveland, Ohio. “It’s a complex mix of genetic, biological, and psychosocial dimensions that can cause ongoing pain out of proportion to the original limited injury that triggered it.”
While today’s longer lifespans are the primary driver of the increase, noted Martin Cheatle… another important factor is the more than 100 million Americans who suffer from obesity. “Obesity is a major risk factor for chronic pain conditions including advancing joint disease, low back pain, and diabetic neuropathies,” he said.
Age is an amplifier, agreed Beth Darnall, PhD…
“Across the board we see striking increases in chronic pain, such as a 5% increase for those 65 and older, and a nearly 2% increase in HICP in that same age group,” Darnall said, referencing the changes from 2019 data in the new NCHS Data Brief…
The COVID pandemic further exacerbated the pain problem and delayed access to timely medical interventions for many people. Some adopted a more sedentary lifestyle, already entrenched in today’s technology-driven society, leading in turn to weight gain and more chronic pain…
Best Approach
“Historically, pain has been treated as a purely biomedical issue. Bringing a biopsychosocial perspective to pain care can support pain relief,” said Darnall. Multiple national clinical guidance documents have called for a comprehensive approach that considers the whole person: their circumstances, their needs, their stressors, and their environment. “And we must provide patients meaningful access to the lowest-risk, non-pharmacologic treatments first – and ideally early on,” she said.
Even effective medications rarely make a person pain free, so other approaches are needed in tandem, Darnall said. Support for stronger patient competency in self-management of chronic pain is mounting…
Since pain causes agitation in the central nervous system, manifested as fast heart rate, rapid breathing, muscle tension, and distress, people learn various ways to calm the central nervous system – with, for example, a sound technology known as binaural audio to deepen the relaxation response. “They also learn to identify and target worry about pain and develop self-soothing actions to interrupt unhelpful patterns,” Darnall said.
Data from randomized chronic pain studies, including one by her group using a virtual reality training program for lower back pain, show that 3 months after the training program people report clinically meaningful reductions in pain intensity, pain interference with daily activities, and sleep disturbance, as well as pain-related distress, anxiety, and fatigue
While psychological and complementary approaches have been effective in improving function and mood, there are barriers to accessing them, said Cheatle, such as lack of insurance coverage and the stigma associated with non-traditional, especially psychological, care…”
Myeloma survivors with chronic pain Myeloma survivors with chronic pain