In the Times newspaper of August 3rd., 22 a significant article which draws on a piece originally published in the Journal of the American Medical Association was included. This article cites the findings of a research study carried out by  ProfessorJames McAuley, a psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, where a group of 138 people suffering from lower back pain were shown that the answer to their pain problems did not lie in more prescription drugs but in retraining the pain sufferers’ brain. 

The researchers found that many of the lower back pain control group were not suffering from either disc problems or injuries to connective tissue or musculature but had experienced incidents where injuries of this sort could have come about. This suggested that the brains of the control group individuals had been through incidents where injuries could have occurred, the brain responding to these near misses by producing the sort of pain normally associated with similar real-time injuries.

This led to the researchers concluding that rather than pharmaceutical  responses to this kind of problem, a solution could be brought about simply by “defogging’ the brain,  in this way, tangible pain control could be achieved 

This study is a reminder that in research carried out at Harvard University it was demonstrated that the human brain does not differentiate between what is seen through the eyes and the optic nerves on the one hand and what is imagined or visualised on the other hand.  This approach is of course similar to what Emile Coue the French psychologist and pharmacist called auto-suggestion, a technique which Coue used to good effect with both pain and self-development/ life improvement issues. 

At the Complementary Medicine Centre, our in-house hypnotherapist uses Coue’s and other techniques to help resolve pain problems. Brian Fleming has some thirty years of therapeutic experience guiding his homoeopathic and hypnotherapy practices.