• Question: How do you help young people and their parents when they are experiencing pain?

    Asked by anon-184206 to Tom, sarahhodge, Owen, Nathan, Abbie on 5 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Nathan Hook

      Nathan Hook answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      Some pain can be sign of a medical problem, and should be discussed with a health professional.

      Other kinds of pain can simply be symptom of an ongoing condition, where the pain needs to be managed. One of many tools to do that is hypnotherapy – mental techniques to draw attention away from the pain.

      For example, until I mention it now, you are probably not aware of the texture of the chair you are in – your body can feel it, but your mind is shutting it out to focus on more important details. In the same way it’s possible to train people to shut out the feeling of the pain.

      For example, here is a video of someone having their front teeth removed, using only hypnosis ton control the pain:

    • Photo: Sarah Hodge

      Sarah Hodge answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      Nathan gave a nice exmaple of physical pain, I am going to answer your question in regards to emotional pain. Interestingly research has suggested people prefer physical pain over emotional pain. Emotional pain, although difficult to deal with, can have a value; it can teach us things about ourselves, how we feel about something and what we think is important and valuable to us. Hence it is important that we talk and think about our pain.

    • Photo: Abbie Jordan

      Abbie Jordan answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      Well, this is my area of research so I will answer in relation to what I do. Usually, the work I do involves working with young people (and their parents) who have chronic pain. That means pain that is ongoing (or comes and goes) for at least three months. Many of these children and young people have had pain for a long time and have visited many doctors and other health professionals to try and figure out what is causing the pain (not always known) and how to manage it. Having pain for a long time that won’t go away can make you feel really down and worried (will it go away? when?, will it get worse?). It can also stop young people from doing things that they want to do like going out with friends and engaging with school as much as they would like. So the work I have done has helped us to better measure the impact of chronic pain on young people’s lives. These questionnaires (or measures) have been used in the UK and across the world to help us better understand what young people are struggling with and whether treatment is helping them to get their lives back on track. At the moment we are trying to look at developmental factors to see how young people’s development may or may not be affected by having ongoing pain.

      This is a general link about some of the state of pain research at the moment. It’s Canadian but very relevant here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_L17jXifHw

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