Chronic Pain Treatment in Sioux Falls

It can be difficult for people with chronic pain to explain the changes in their lives to their loved ones. Our society has little patience for suffering, and well-meaning individuals can quickly lose sympathy and the desire to understand.

The problem is chronic pain isn’t just a symptom of an injury or illness. Chronic pain is also the root cause of many other conditions. The one dealing with chronic pain finds more and more of their bodily systems are affected over time, leaving them less able to cope. Here are a few of the conditions caused by chronic pain:

• An estimated 85% of chronic pain patients experience mental illness in the form of depression and anxiety. Patients are forced to make decisions based on their pain level rather than desire. They can feel isolated and alone. They see a bleak future where they never feel comfortable. It’s incredibly taxing emotionally as well as physically.
• Every year a patient experiences chronic pain, they lose a 1.5 cm cube of gray matter. Gray matter is the portion of the brain that helps with decision-making, learning, attention span, focus, memory, and motor function. It takes 10 to 20 years for the average person to lose that much gray matter due to aging.
• People with chronic pain tend to move less. Muscle atrophy and the resulting weakness lead to deteriorating posture and body alignment. This causes unusual wear on joints, muscle tension, gait, and motor function.
• Chronic pain disrupts sleep patterns. Every part of the body needs sleep. During sleep cycles, the body focuses on repairing itself from the damage of the day. When the body can’t fall into regular, restorative sleep patterns, the cracks start to show. The long-term consequences of insomnia include hypertension, cardiovascular disease, high cholesterol, weight gain, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke, and colorectal cancer.
• The body releases cortisol when it is under stress. Cortisol helps your body stay on high alert, which can be good for dealing with those tense situations that crop up from time to time. But chronic pain creates constant stress, so your body reacts by releasing excessive amounts of cortisol. Too much cortisol can increase inflammation, disrupt sleep, raise blood pressure, lower metabolism, and mess with your blood sugar levels.
• Excessive inflammation from chronic pain causes oxidation and free radical damage and speeds aging and cell death.
• The constant stress levels from chronic pain create a perpetual fight-or-flight response. This means that certain body systems get downgraded in order to prioritize those deemed most crucial to the stress response. This is alright for short bursts, but when things like chronic pain prolong the fight-or-flight response, those downgraded body systems experience restricted blood flow, oxygenation, and nutrient exchange. Tissues in the extremities start to die.
• Constant pain lowers testosterone levels, leading to lowered libido in both men and women and erectile dysfunction.

Chronic pain treatment is essential in correcting many of these complex, interrelated issues. A major source of chronic pain is neuropathy, caused by various underlying conditions.

When we turn an ankle, our bodies go limp as we fall to prevent greater damage. When we enter bright light after being in the dark too long, the iris closes to restrict excess light from entering the eye.

Nerves leaving the spinal column spread out in complicated formations to every organ, bone, and inch of skin. Damage to those nerves is called peripheral neuropathy. The biofeedback system is interrupted, corrupted, or destroyed depending on the source of damage and how long it continues without intervention. The brain can interpret corrupted signals as pressure, tingling, pins and needles, heat, cold, sharp, or dull pain. If there are no sensation signals, the brain may interpret this as either temporary or permanent numbness.

Alcohol — Excessive blood alcohol levels cause blood vessels to constrict. The thinner passageways allow less blood through. The tiniest blood vessels are affected more severely. Like diabetic neuropathy, alcohol starves the nerves in the extremities.

Nicotine — Nicotine is also a vasoconstrictor (constricts blood vessels).

Toxins — There are a number of chemicals, compounds, and elements that can attack the nervous system, causing neuropathy. Many of these are in our environment in small amounts. For example, zinc is an essential nutrient in the proper dosage, and nitrous oxide used in dentists’ offices is rarely harmful.

Toxicity depends upon the length and amount of exposure and whether our bodies naturally get rid of the substance. The following substances may be harmful under certain conditions:

• Acrylamide in cigarettes
• Arsenic in contaminated well water
• Brevetoxin from shellfish
• Buckthorn berries, bark, and roots
• Cadmium in tobacco products
• Carbon disulfide is used in some manufacturing products.
• Ciguatera toxin in shellfish
• Ethanol in lacquers, aerosols, gas, solvents, and more
• Ethylene glycol in antifreeze
• Hexacarbons in glues and solvents
• Lead was found in homes before 1978, glasswork, and other hobbies.
• Mercury is found in fish, and after breaking something containing mercury, like thermometers, where it evaporates into the air we breathe.
• Nitrous oxide in aerosol cans, glues, and clinical settings like dentists
• Organophosphates in insecticides
• Saxitoxin in shellfish
• Thallium in cigarettes, manufacturing, and hazardous waste sites
• Zinc Toxicity from smelting, welding, toxic waste, and people taking too much as supplements.

Chemotherapy — Cancer patients face many hard choices. Cancer is an invasive disease that can spread to multiple bodily systems, making decisive action necessary to preserve life. Chemo is one of the methods used to kill cancer cells. Cancer cells have higher metabolisms than other cells and take in the toxin faster. The trick is to use enough toxins to kill the cancer cells without killing healthy cells.

Unfortunately, the level of toxicity required to kill cancer can damage some of the more sensitive structures and cells in the body, which is why cancer patients lose their hair. The drugs also attack the tiny nerves in your hands and feet.

Some doctors are using ice around the feet and hands to make blood vessels constrict during chemotherapy infusions in order to force the toxins away from the nerves. As with any cancer treatment, it’s a balancing act between necessary and unnecessary damage.

Autoimmune Disorders — Our immune systems are essentially armies of warrior cells attacking pathogens and substances that can harm our bodies. Sometimes, the warrior cells get confused and start attacking healthy tissue, leading to a host of problems.

Not everyone develops autoimmune disorders under the same conditions. Certain ethnicities, genders, and nationalities predispose some individuals to the disorders. Other factors include nutrition levels, environmental exposures, and general health.

Common symptoms indicative of autoimmune disorders are fatigue, dizziness, muscle aches, swelling, trouble concentrating, low-grade fever, numbness and tingling in your hands and feet, skin rash, and hair loss. If you have symptoms that are recurring or last longer than any trauma or pathogen can explain, check with your doctor.

Autoimmune disorders include type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis/psoriatic arthritis, multiple sclerosis, systemic lupus erythematosus, inflammatory bowel disease, Addison’s disease, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, myasthenia gravis, autoimmune vasculitis.

Infectious Disease — There are viral and bacterial agents that cause peripheral neuropathy.

• Viral pathogens: HIV, human T-cell lymphotropic virus, varicella-zoster virus, cytomegalovirus, epstein-barr virus, West Nile virus, and hepatitis C virus
  
• Bacterial pathogens: Borrelia burgdorferi, corynebacterium diphtheria, campylobacter jejuni, mycobacterium leprae, and brucellosis

Genetic Disease — Hereditary neuropathy is passed from parent to child. Researchers have isolated 30 genes that lead to hereditary neuropathy. Just like all genetics, there’s no telling what genes you’ll pick up from each parent, so it’s not guaranteed you will inherit the disease. Still, it does raise the risk. If you’re experiencing neurological symptoms, check with your doctor.

Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease is a term for a group of hereditary neuropathies.

Dealing with the discomfort can be difficult. The better option is to try to prevent or minimize the temperature change altogether.

• Wear insulated and impermeable gloves and boots to protect your hands and feet from extreme cold.
• Use a thermostat to keep your home at a constant, comfortable temperature.
• Swim in indoor pools in the summer so you don’t transition from hot ambient temperatures to drastically colder water.
• Run errands and exercise in the morning on hot days and during the afternoon on cold days.

Sleep — Neuropathy can hurt normal sleep patterns. Some days, your feet might be too sensitive to bear the weight of a bedsheet, and you can’t find foot pain neuropathy relief. Rolling over may prove painful. Or you can have difficulty falling or staying asleep.

Lack of sleep can actually worsen symptoms. Fortunately, there are things you can do to improve your chances for a good night’s sleep and neuropathy pain relief.

• Keep your bedroom between 68 and 75°F.
• Establish nightly routines so your body knows when to shut down for the night.
• Gentle stretches and massage can ease tension in muscles and nerves in the affected areas.
• Use blackout curtains because ambient light from street lamps can keep you from sleeping deeply and can even trick your body into thinking the sun is coming up.
• Blackout curtains are particularly important for people who work odd shifts and must sleep during the day.
• Keep all electronics out of your bedroom.
• Reading or playing a game can be tempting if you wake up, but you can spend much more time playing the game than you intend, losing precious hours of sleep.
• Don’t stare at the dark ceiling for hours, which can feel increasingly frustrating, adding to your sleeplessness. Get up, get a drink of water, go to the bathroom, go through your bedtime ritual again, and then lie down.
• You may find that white noise, like ocean waves or a fan, helps you block out other sounds that may wake you, like a neighbor’s dog barking at 2 AM.

Balance — In addition to pain and sleepless nights, you may wobble or feel unsteady and trip more frequently than before. Your brain responds to hundreds of signals from your feet and legs to keep you upright. Your brain makes constant mini-corrections in response to changes in the terrain. If your nerves can’t send those signals, your brain must rely on visual and auditory cues to help you stay balanced.

If your nerve signals are delayed, you can experience slow reaction times. This can lead to more falls.

Independence — Peripheral neuropathy can cause you to rely on others for your basic needs. Neuropathy can cause muscle weakness, making lifting and gripping things hard. If you can’t feel your feet, you can’t feel your car’s gas and brake pedals. Buttoning a shirt, fixing a meal, opening a jar, doing home repairs, doing housework, typing, texting, and even driving to your pain clinic in Sioux Falls get harder to do on your own.

Traditional pain treatment uses drugs to mask pain and interrupt electrical signals to the brain. Antidepressants and anti-seizure medications can help a patient find more comfort, but they don’t address the root causes of the pain and ongoing damage to the nerves. The longer the damage continues, the more likely it will be for the condition to become permanent.

We at Axiom Chiropractic & Neuropathy are dedicated to discovering and treating the root cause of your pain so that we can provide effective, lasting neuropathy pain relief, not just pain management.