My Account
A few weeks ago I attended the NZ Pain Society conference in Taranaki. It brings together a large number of health professionals involved in the management of persistent pain in NZ, and is a way of keeping up to date with what is new in this field.
I am a big believer in the power of language to help or hinder the way that we, as health professionals, and people themselves, manage their health problems. Too often, we use negative language to describe health problems and their management. This can lead to people developing longstanding thought patterns and behaviours that end up being a hindrance rather than a help with managing the problem.
One of the main speakers at this conference was a professor of pain management from Canada, Serge Marchand, who presented a study on how our brains can determine how much pain we are experiencing, just by the power of words.
Because of the ethics involved in medical studies, the best way that researchers can measure changes in pain without causing harm to someone, is to ask willing subjects to, for example, put their arms in freezing cold water, and see how long they can tolerate this before the pain becomes too much. There are no long standing problems caused by doing this, and most people last about 30-40 seconds before the discomfort becomes too much and they pull their arm out of the water.
In Professor Marchand’s study, subjects were asked to do this, and the time taken before they took their arms out was recorded. They were then given morphine, and prior to taking it were told that this was a really strong pain reliever, and that taking it would mean they could keep their arm in the water for much longer. Sure enough, the subjects generally kept their arms in the water for longer after taking the pill. The subjects were then given the very same dose of morphine but this time they were told that it would make their pain far worse, and that they wouldn’t be able to tolerate the icy water for very long: the result was that even though the subjects had taken the same dose, they were not able to keep their arms in the icy water for as long, and reported greater levels of pain, sooner. Such was the impact of what their brain had done with the information they had been given.
This study reflects a lot of other work that is being done in this area around the power of language on our brain function. It also showed how language can have negative, as well as positive, impacts on us. This reinforces advice that we have all heard a million times before but often took with a grain of salt – “don’t underestimate the power of your brain, and positive and negative thoughts, when it comes to your behaviour and life in general – but particularly your health”.
