Posted 10/14/2014 4:22 AM (GMT 0)
Hello All,
With Abilene's encouragement (spreading the blame ;) I have decided to start this thread about chronic pain treatment using EMDR. First of all, I am a guy with a decent medical vocabulary and no credentials. I am posting my experience only. No recommendations, no selling products, I'm just in CP like you. If others have experience with this technique for CP, please post here. If you have used this technique for trauma, PTSD, Etc it might be more helpful in another forum, but I don't mind if you want to post in here.
I am actually a lab rat/test dummy for a friend who has used EMDR with great success to treat trauma and PTSD for over 30 years, but who is only recently applying it to chronic pain. The specific protocol for CP I believe was developed by an Aussie named Mark Grant. He sells an app on Google Play called Anxiety that I have recently purchased. He updated it to loop continuously for me and everyone else (it runs only 16 minutes at a time otherwise) at no charge. I have found the reconfigured app useful, but I'm not selling it and do not care if you buy it. There are other sources for bilateral tones and music.
EMDR...finally, what it is. Please just hear me out to the end. I've got my own fentanyl patch and percs on right now so I am not saying this is magic. In a nutshell, the practitioner stimulates your nervous system through one or more of your senses alternating left and right with a period of a second or two. It can be taps on the leg, following the practitioners finger with your eyes, and/or, you guessed it, listening to sounds. Think the ticking of a clock, where each tick alternates from ear to ear, back and forth. This "bilateral stimulation" supposedly appeals to your unconscious. The practitioner leads you through a series of simple questions regarding your pain. You basically answer with whatever nonsense comes to your mind. Today my pain was an intense green dot radiating with concentric red circles. . .yours may be a blue blob textured like lobster eggs, who knows. You say it. You then just focus on that image (for example) and the practitioner will guide you through an evolution of that image, your pain, and your belief in statements that you made prior to the start of bilateral stimulation. I have had 3 treatments. They have ranged from 1 to 1.5 hours in length, with some results you could not have made me believe had I not tried it.
Read past the section in asterisks if you don't care about the details of my pain
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Since even before my ACDF, which is chronicled in another thread, I have had an intense burning acidic pain just to the right of my left shoulder blade. It wraps around under the outside of my shoulder blade near my shoulder socket and attaches to my neck at C4-6ish. I think it is the serratus muscle. Anyway, this pain hangs out around a 5 but kicks up to a 7 after my rather long, 25 minute shaving procedure. 10 on my scale makes you unconscious, you cant form sentences at 8 or above for reference. That is on 12ucg/hr fentanyl twice daily backed by 5/350 Percocet. It's bad enough pain to want it to go away specifically beyond my broad based cord pain.
Clearly the meds aren't killing the pain. I've tried a variety of patches and compound creams to make this pain go away and none have worked (although they are mentioned in my useful items before ACDF thread), with the notable exception of Salonpas. Those OTC patches make you smell like menthol, but after about 4hrs of wearing this specific pain would go away. Wearing it for 8 hours made the pain go away, or nearly so, for 24 hours plus. I was REALLY excited when I found they worked.
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Treatment #1 about 5 weeks ago
My treatment went just as I discussed above and lasted about 1.5hrs. He played a simple, old school computer "beep" using a little white box. The back and forth beeping somehow seemed comforting and when the session of, what is basically Q&A, ended, I was quite relaxed and my pain was gone. . .but I was also wearing a Salonpas patch. . .for the last time.
Upon finishing the treatment I found that the pain was really just not there. It was like it was numb. The muscle was still tight and stretching it still pulled and popped my neck. . .but the pain was not there, and I mean at all. This is a deep acidic burning pain unaddressed by any medicine I have ever tried. . .using beeps and talking, I swear to God its true. As the days passed I noticed when I'd be stooped over in the lab that the pain would start to creep back in. I would think of a certain image that we had stored in my head during the treatment and the pain would disappear into the background. If I thought of the image while stretching that super tight muscle, the muscle would instantly start to give more.
Treatment #2 about 3 weeks ago
When working at my desk where I needed to concentrate I found that I could not imagine the image and work simultaneously. It actually became a bit of trouble, so my friend offered a second practice treatment. This treatment went a little more quickly, the beeping was again comforting and I was relaxed at the end. It was around this time that my friend made me aware of the App, and very shortly thereafter I found the apps major shortcoming for CP, a play time of 16 minutes. What I needed was the constant tick-tock for hours. Again, some people use music for this, but I concentrate much better with a simple "beep" and the app's is frankly not very good, but it works. The app has now been updated and will run continuously. I really appreciate Mark (whom I do not know at all, and emailed me within the day of my asking for and update or refund) fixing it free of charge. There were like 100 downloads when I bought it, so this is clearly not his prime source of income.
Anyway, similar results to last time. No Salonpas patches, pain (over time) made to go away by visualization of the image or suppressed by the tones, or both. As time has worn on I have lost the ability to recall the image. But, by simply trying to get at that image I have still been able to remove the pain.
Treatment #3 - today
Last weekend I began major surgery on my truck which needs entire brake system replacement. The actual failure of the brakes was "!a stressor!", the labor difficult for me to say the least, oh and by the way I found out I'm losing my job, oh and some other major life events all of which are crashing on me over the course of the last week. I can hardly mow my lawn (rider) so the brakes are major all by themselves. Why don't I pay someone. . .see last sentence, look for "lost job." Not good to be TRW that week.
Anyway, I have been having more pain that I just cannot tamp back down. So I asked for a third treatment this morning, and to make sure I was good and screwed I went ahead and shaved. I am ready to sit down, for a very long time, when my friend finally arrives. We have an initial interview without the beeping as per the norm, and then he turns the beeping on.
BAM! each beep sears my eardrum with an intensity that is hard to describe. It is sort of a therapeutic pain, like stretching or massage, but exceedingly intense. I almost can't stand it, it's like looking into the sun. The very first beep caused my left shoulder to leap forward several inches. It retracted and lurched forward again. It was like a freaking excorcism. . .and we hadn't even really started. Throughout the course of the treatment the pain moved from its spot by my shoulder blade around toward my shoulder socket and on to the neck and back the same route to the original spot. The progression I just described was a very odd sequence of muscle relaxation The whole time only the left shoulder was lurching and twitching, it was pretty unbelievable. The pain kind of burrowed back into its original spot and while it disappeared, it left behind a fairly chilling image of color and texture in my mind that seemed to mean that it would be coming back. It's hard to describe this little detail in a way that doesn't sound manufactured.
The lurching and twitching of my shoulder ebbed and flowed over the course of the treatment but it was there the whole time. The searing of the beeps on my eardrums was so significant, filled with some form of meaning, each and every beep. When the pain sort of imploded in on itself my left tricep began to spasm for what seemed like several minutes in big painless spasms that must have looked like I had Parkinsons. The tension in the shoulder gone I noticed a very intense pain begin to develop at the left base of my neck, say C7-T1. It hurt, BAD, and it was related to the searing beeps on my eardrums. My friend asked if I'd like to stop or turn the volume down, but I said I wanted to see where this went. My shoulder continued it's lurching and twitching as I focused on the pain. The pain diminished in a few tens of seconds but my shoulder kept lurching and twitching. I must have relaxed and evened up (I carry this shoulder 3" lower than the other. . .it took a telephone pole 3 feet out of the ground) because my friend stopped the beeping abruptly. Just as abruptly the twitching ended. The treatment was over.
Today was my first day ever unemployed. I got NO, ZERO sleep last night. After the treatment I looked for jobs and removed a virus from our PC in my RFM Verte (ka-freaking-ching!) office chair, it took all day. Then I hung out at a vaping bar for an hour or so picking up some products for my friends, at whose house we ate dinner. We came home (17 miles one way) and I started typing this up. I cant say I am exactly pain free, the pain really feels like FREEZING cold. The muscle is so tight it is pulling my neck out of whack and causing it to pop when I stretch. . .but the spot itself where the real nasty pain is, is very tolerable and not really what I would call pain. My understanding is that this is exactly what EMDR does. It recategorizes your pain sensation into something else to your brain, maybe even to a sensation you are able to forget about. It seems like total voodoo to me and as a "hard" scientist I simply would not believe it had I not been the test subject. I'm learning quite a bit about the "softer" sciences with my adventures in pain.
So I don't know what the future will hold with this one specific, albeit very persistent and annoying, pain that only alternating days of fairly expensive Salonpas patches could touch (on top of fentanyl, Percocet, Neurontin, valium, and effexor). But the treatment is cheap, available, and immediately effective after the first treatment (for me) so maybe it's worth a shot. I apologize for being so wordy, but I hope this was a helpful write-up of my experience with EMDR and I appreciate you reading. I'll say right now that I have not read much at all about EMDR and I really cannot address it's scientific premise at this time for CP or anything else. That said, if there is a need and an interest as this thread develops, I can try to get Mark Grant to stop in and make a post in here. From the searches I have done it has been very easy to locate people in my area that use EMDR for chronic pain, but I'm in the northeast where things are very dense.
I wish us all the best,
Steve