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How to Resolve Chronic Pain Naturally
176 Plays1 year ago
Chronic Pain specialist Dr. Andrea Moore tells us her personal story of recovery and how we can use neuroscience to resolve chronic pain.
Find her at: https://www.drandreamoore.com/
https://www.instagram.com/drandreamoore/
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Transcript
Understanding Pain as a Signal
00:00:05
Speaker
I've been saying for months that pain is a messenger. It literally is a signal from the body to the brain that something is wrong. As we've covered in earlier episodes, much of how our brain interprets this message dictates the pain we feel. Today I'm speaking with
Dr. Andrea Moore's Journey with Chronic Pain
00:00:21
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Dr. Andrea Moore. She's a chronic pain specialist with a PhD in physical therapy, a board certified orthopedic specialist, functional nutritional therapy practitioner, and a certified life coach.
00:00:33
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She'll tell us her story of overcoming chronic pain and how she developed her unique treatment plans. She'll tell us the one thing causing chronic pain in professional dancers that she's treated and the modality she's found to be most helpful in treating chronic pain. I'm Stephanie Greenwood and this is The Life Decox.
00:01:07
Speaker
Andrea's motivation to specialize in chronic pain healing came about through her own experiences. I became a physical therapist. I graduated from school in 2011. Literally the universe just handed me patients with more complex conditions with chronic pain from the get-go. I very quickly realized that school had not equipped me to help them.
00:01:29
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at all. And I also had chronic pain myself. It was almost to the point where I literally thought that everybody felt what I was feeling, that I was just a baby about it, like that I was the only one who complained about it. I didn't realize until I started asking patients because that's part of what we do, like, oh, tell me about what else hurts or, you know, things like that. People be like, it's literally just my knee. And I'm like, your back doesn't also hurt like your hips don't. And they're like, no. And I'm like, oh, that is just me. OK.
00:02:00
Speaker
It was like this combination of both having a lot of complex patients on my schedule, realizing that they weren't really getting better with what I had learned in PT school. And then my own body realizing, whoa, like, maybe this isn't normal. What I'm experienced does not seem to be the norm of a lot of other people's experiences.
Experiencing Post-Concussive Syndrome
00:02:19
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In the middle of that, getting into a bad car accident and ending up with post-concussive syndrome where I was out of work for six months and I got to experience the whole invisible condition because I didn't have a scratch in my body, but yet I couldn't work. I did not have access to my brain like I needed to. And I just kept being told, learn to live with it. You're stuck this way. There's nothing we can do. But was it being offered like any treatment
00:02:47
Speaker
And that was what really like blew my mind is I would go back every week and they would do tests and they're like, yup, you're still concussed. And I'm like, are you going to like do anything or tell me anything? Like there was no advice. There was nothing other than like, well, just rest lay off things and come back next week. And I'm like, I feel like you guys think that you testing me on a computer is somehow treatment. It is not.
00:03:10
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And so I just got really aggressive of like, I was already into the natural world and the holistic world and alternative world anyways.
Integrating Somatic Work and Trauma Therapy
00:03:17
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I just kept searching and through then trying to heal my own concussion and really ending up with a lot of lingering symptoms and having a lot of emotions about these symptoms. I came across somatic work and work with a nervous system.
00:03:32
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And what was so cool about it was that I had been already learning about chronic pain through the physical therapy mindset. Pain neuroscience from this more, I mean, it still is, I guess, novel in some ways, but you know, in physical therapy, we learn pain neuroscience, we learn how chronic pain affects the nervous system. There's this understanding of, okay, chronic pain is due to a hypersensitive nervous system.
00:03:56
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I guess you could go meditate and do some things like there's really no good again, there was like no treatment for it. It was this understanding, but there was no clear what to do with people. And then when I delved into the more trauma side of the world that had nothing to do with chronic pain, I was just trying to deal with my own emotional symptoms. I was like, Oh my gosh, this is exactly what chronic pain needs for healing. Like why is nobody connecting these two worlds?
00:04:21
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Like it's like these two bodies are holding this immense knowledge. Someone just needs to bridge it together because it fits perfectly.
Parental Expectations and Young Dancers' Pain
00:04:27
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One of the aspects that I really dealt with in the trauma side of things was how society affects us, was how ancestry affects us and how like generations before us have affected and shaped our nervous system and who we are today and what our nervous system is holding on to. And so when I would align this all with those with chronic pain, it's been
00:04:50
Speaker
This amazing, amazing results. Dr. Moore ended up working with a lot of professional dancers dealing with chronic pain. Some of the population I worked with was very young dancers, so like adolescents, teenagers. And what I found often was that they didn't want to dance. It wasn't their passion. It was their mom's passion. And their moms were trying to live vicariously through them.
00:05:17
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And it was heartbreaking. I probably cried so many times for some of these girls because their mom would leave the room and they would just break down and be like, I don't want to do that performance. Like I don't want to do this, but like I can't tell my mom. And I think it's such a clear example of when we are kids and we are literally, especially for some of these who it's like they're 12 years old, they are at the
00:05:38
Speaker
mercy of their parents. They don't have the autonomy or the safety. I mean some did, like some we could talk through it and like it did feel safe to really be open with their moms and they would do that and it was awesome and their moms had a hard time but they could accept it. But for some of them it was not an option. They're like, I cannot say that to my mom. And it shows how our nervous system has to shut down a part of ourselves to have that bid for connection.
00:06:08
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with the person who's in charge of us the person who's putting a roof over our head who's feeding us right it's not until we're you know 16 18 years old where it's like we have the potential to be autonomous it's like until you have a car and are making money and
00:06:23
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can go off and feed yourself, it's pretty hard to really be fully yourself. Part of going from teenager to adulthood is learning that we now can be autonomous, that it is now safe to take up space where maybe it wasn't fully before.
00:06:42
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Dr.
Trauma's Role in Chronic Pain
00:06:43
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Moore sees that sometimes trauma and unaddressed needs can create chronic pain, but the pain itself can be traumatic, thus increasing the pain even more.
00:06:58
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especially for women just contributes to the trauma. It's like you have the moment of pain itself and then on top of it so it's like everything after the pain started can be like layers of trauma on top of it so that could be a crappy doctor's appointment you go to or people not listening to right you have all of that and so it's like we need to work through all of that and only then sometimes can we actually look at what even led to the pain in the first place. We have to work through the layers and
00:07:23
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And a lot of times there are many layers that are just from experiences from the pain itself. And then we dig deeper of like, okay, then why did the pain even come? What's the message from the body in the first place? But sometimes we can't hear that until some of the other layers are cleared because there's just so many other things that happened in our experiences of trying to get the pain addressed.
00:07:45
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I told her about my own challenge in addressing a lot of my own physical and emotional pain and how, for some reason, I just can't get started. What I see with a lot of my women is it's because the body knows that when you heal, when you work through this, you might be up to something in the world that doesn't feel safe due to what the body's holding on to.
00:08:09
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So here you are, right? You're out here putting your voice out to the world literally through a podcast, right? Ultimately, while your brain might logically be like, Hey, I'm safe, like I'm on a podcast, it's fine. Your nervous system is holding on to who knows what from your lineage.
Societal Impacts on Women's Healing
00:08:27
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that it just is not safe for women to speak up and use their voice and to be against something that's so conventional and mainstream that's literally could get a woman killed. And so your body might be like, oh my God, don't heal. Like if I'm producing pain, that's going to stop you. That's going to slow you down. That's going to keep you safe because then you can't go out, you know, mess around with the world a little bit.
00:08:50
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And the job is, we don't know what work that I do, isn't like, okay, yep, we're just gonna listen to the body and keep ourselves small. No, it's how do we find safety in using our voice? How can we update our nervous system the current time in reality that actually in 2023, it is safe for women to use their voice? And there might still be some risks, don't get me wrong, right? But how can we bring safety to that? How can we show our bodies that actually we can do it?
00:09:21
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When we get back from the break, Dr. Moore will tell us the science behind how pain can linger even once tissue has healed.
Sponsorship Break: Bubble and Be Organic
00:09:34
Speaker
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00:09:54
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Therapeutic Neuroscience Education Explained
00:10:16
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So what is therapeutic neuroscience? There is something called therapeutic neuroscience education, TNE, and it is just a way of teaching people about how their nervous system works, how chronic pain works in the body. Because what often is the assumption is that if you have an area like your low back or your knee or something like that that hurts, the assumption is there is something wrong with the tissue there that is creating pain.
00:10:46
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But what we find is really after three months...
00:10:49
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at most six months at times, usually not though, the tissues have healed. If you sprain your ankle, it's gonna take at most three months for the tissues to heal. Often it could be as little as a week or two weeks, depending on the degree of it. If the healing has happened in 25% of people, what doesn't shift is the sensitivity of the nervous system. So after an injury, your nervous system sensitivity is going to ramp up
00:11:16
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to help protect you so you can heal from the injury. And this is a really good thing because if you're somebody who's a go, go, go type personality, if you literally sprained your ankle really badly, I'm going to guess if there wasn't pain, you wouldn't be like, oh, let me lay off of it right now.
00:11:34
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So you're going to keep going and it's like you really could create further damage. It's like, oh no, you should not run the next day after you sprain your ankle. That's just not a good idea. Let it heal and then you can get back to running, no problem. So pain is going to stop you from doing that until the tissues are healed. And so what should happen as the tissues are healing, the nervous system should be ramping down in sensitivity.
00:11:56
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And oftentimes, you know, you can just slowly get back into activity. And when all is working as it should, that's what happens. But for about 25% of people, which is a massive amount of people, the tissues heal, but the nervous system stays sensitized. So any pain that is now being felt is not from tissue damage, it is from the nervous system itself.
00:12:20
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still being hypersensitive about the area.
The Role of Education in Pain Reduction
00:12:23
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I always compare it to like that car alarm that goes off when you like just look at the car the wrong way, right? Like the sound is just as loud. So it's like the pain is just as real but it is too sensitive, right? It's not, it is reacting to you looking at the car the wrong way as if it was a threat in the same way it should be reacting to somebody breaking into the car.
00:12:45
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And so it's like the sensitivity is just too high. We need to ramp down the system. Sometimes just explaining this process relieved pain in her clients. The explanation for some people when they understand that like, oh, it's now safe to walk on my ankle or even run even when pain is present sometimes is enough. Like literally it was especially when I was in the clinic, 50% of the people I would say that's a made up statistic.
00:13:10
Speaker
But it's like, I could just explain it to them, walk them through therapeutic neuroscience, pain neuroscience, and they're like, sweet. And they started moving more for like, yeah, body, we're safe. And after like a couple weeks, it's like the body had ramped down the sensitivity and they were good to go. But for others, it is not so simple. Sometimes that type of education is not only not enough, but can actually make people feel not hurt, can make certain people feel like, oh, you're just telling me the pain is all in my head.
00:13:40
Speaker
And that's not true, but it's also not enough. Just learning about pain can be a start, but it is, for some, definitely. For me, myself, was not enough to actually bring down my pain levels. And so that's also where the work I ended up evolving into. Why it evolved is because in the physical therapy realm, there was such just an emphasis on the education piece with the assumption that just educating people is gonna be enough.
00:14:08
Speaker
And it's like, again, it's a start, but it's not enough. And I even want to add one more thing to that. One of the guys, one of the, I mean, amazing physical therapists who teaches pain education and used to be a promoter of like, just educate, that's enough that changes people's pain and actually did a study and he came out, I think it was last year. I mean, fairly recently, and was like, just kidding. Like, it's not like we are finding it is not enough.
00:14:32
Speaker
And it was just pretty cool to see him be like, OK, I take back some of what I said. It's not enough. We're finding that it is improving people's quality of life, but it's not improving their pain levels. What modalities do you find do help to release that trauma?
Somatic Work and Embodiment for Healing
00:14:47
Speaker
Definitely somatic work, embodiment work, parts work. So really getting to know these different parts of ourselves.
00:14:55
Speaker
Somatic work, for those that might not be familiar with the phrase, is an umbrella term for different modalities that connect the body with the mind. One might sit and acknowledge tension in parts of the body in a meditative way, or while bringing up certain memories or thoughts, be directed to move in a way that empowers or releases fear.
00:15:15
Speaker
It also includes dance therapy, massage, breathing exercises, visualization, grounding, sensation awareness, and other related practices. Getting to really understand them with compassion, to really hear what they have to say, why they're holding fear, why they're holding anxiety or anger or grief or anything, and to have these parts feel validated
00:15:43
Speaker
and heard and loved upon and welcomed because they are all part of ourselves. And sometimes what happens is we have a part of us that could be stuck thinking at five years old and it's the part that's now running the show.
00:16:01
Speaker
It's making the decisions, right? Like when you get triggered up, it's like all of a sudden it might be your five-year-old part that's on board and having to make this big life decision. And it's like, that's not fair to the five-year-old part. You wouldn't want a five-year-old running your life. And so with its style of somatic and embodiment work that I do, we are actually relieving these parts of a job that's just too big for them. And it's putting our authentic selves, our adults,
00:16:27
Speaker
autonomous sovereign selves back in charge of our lives.
00:16:31
Speaker
What's the top advice you would give to listeners who might be experiencing chronic pain? That's turning inwards, listening to it, instead of trying to fight it or fix it. It sounds counterintuitive, but often when we can do that, when we can be with it, when we can finally hear it, that is what will often bring it down. It's like sometimes what it has to say might be not what we want to hear. It might mean facing some hard
00:16:59
Speaker
truths. It might be setting new boundaries. It could be changing a job entirely, right? It could be moving to another state. Or it could just be something like sleep more. Right? Drink, please drink more water. Right? It's like, sometimes they're simple. And sometimes they are more complex. And often, when these parts just feel heard and really listened to, sometimes like, let's say it was something big, like changing a job. Sometimes it
00:17:28
Speaker
You don't have to change the job for the pain to go away. Sometimes it's like you're just even starting to look for new jobs, just starting to set boundaries that your current job is enough. It's like, okay, you listen, right? Like you're hearing me and it's like now you're starting to make moves. And so the biggest advice is like, can you trust your own body's wisdom? Can you turn inwards to reconnect yourself back to that? And that there's hope, there's so much hope.
00:17:53
Speaker
Tell me about your practice and how people can contact you. Yes. All the work I do now is remote. It's all virtual. So it doesn't matter where you live. And again, because I'm working through a lot of group programs now. And the best place to find me is on Instagram. That's kind of where I hang out the most. I am at Dr. Andrea Moore. And I also have a podcast called the Unweaving Chronic Pain Podcast. So that's another great place to just hear more about what I have to say, my methodologies, and things like that, and to hear about any upcoming
00:18:22
Speaker
And I have I just want to say thank you for bringing this work to your listeners. I think it is so important. And I think I guess the last thing would be just emphasizing that even if there is a medical condition that this mind body type of work applies. I think I have a couple episodes about that on my podcast, because I think that is one of the biggest hindrances that I see for people delving
00:18:45
Speaker
into it is they're like, but I have PCOS, but I have Endo. Yes, that's exactly why this work is so crucial, that it can significantly improve your quality of life. It can get you back doing the things that you love, like hiking and being out in nature and being able to kitchen dance and whatever other fun things that you have.
00:19:08
Speaker
And the other thing is just don't stop advocating for yourself. You can find Dr. Andrea Mora at her website, which I linked to in the show notes, as well as her Instagram. Acknowledging our pain, whether it's physical or emotional or both, is so important for healing. If we don't listen to our pain, when we shove it down, when we ignore it, it only gets worse.
00:19:35
Speaker
Our pain is a beautiful messenger to tell us that something is wrong. Embracing and listening to our pain is how we can release it and regain our lives. But sometimes the messages it tells us can be inconvenient or even scary. Sometimes your pain can tell you that you may need to set a boundary with someone or that you may need to make some radical life changes. That you might need a life detox.
00:20:11
Speaker
The Life Detox is produced by me, Stephanie Greenwood, and brought to you by Bubble and Be Organic. The views and opinions expressed are the speakers' own and do not necessarily represent those of myself or my company. Material and information presented here is for general information purposes only and is not medical advice. Being a guest on this show does not imply endorsement of Greenplay LLC or any of its projects. Stay well, friends.