How a bit of yoga can help with a big health problem — chronic pain | Rachael West | TEDxBunbury

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if you had your leg amputated in the 1700s you didn't get anaesthetic maybe a little bit of wine to take the edge off by 1846 we'd invented pretty effective anesthetics that would numb your pain during surgery but people still had their leg sworn off without anesthetic do you want to know why because we thought pain could bring you closer to God because we thought the nice ladies might get erotic ly aroused if they were unconscious and do something they'd regret later and because we thought that the opportunity to show your courage and strength in the face of pain was something no surgeon should deny you it sounds ridiculous but today what we think about pain is still as much governed by our societal norms and cultural beliefs as it is by any improved scientific knowledge and the scientific knowledge we have today that is challenging a lot of our beliefs is the knowledge that pain is actually an experience made by your brain think about the last time you felt pain maybe you stubbed your toe or hit your thumb with a hammer you really felt pain in the toe or your thumb but actually 100% made in your brain now pain is actually quite useful it stops you doing dumb things so how it works you put your hand in the fire brain says that's a little bit dangerous sends out warning signals like pain and you take your hand out of the fire it's protective but in the area of pain I've dedicated the past 10 years to chronic or persistent pain this pain response is not so well calibrated your nervous system has become sensitized so that your brain sends out these warning signals of pain when things aren't really that dangerous so for many people this happens when pain goes on longer than you would expect after surgery or trauma but for many people there's almost no apparent cause at all now if this is starting to sound familiar it really should because one in five of us experiences chronic pain and as a country we're spending thirty four billion dollars on it every year in terms of direct costs that's more we're spending more in direct medical costs than we do on cancer but actually most about thirty four billion dollars is the years of disability and lost work hours from people with ongoing pain now if your first thought when you have pain is that you would take pain medication you might be surprised at how ineffective they are one of the ones we've been most commonly prescribing opioids it has according to some information from pain Australia an average reduction in pain of 30% usually with negative side effects and of course with that small issue of the risk of addiction plus our beliefs that pain always equals tissue damage is making us go for a heap of scans and tests that aren't helpful and actually can make pain worse because they worry us so it's sounding pretty terrible but there is some really good news and it's that if your brain can change to feel more pain you can change your brain to feel less pain and the best way that health care has at the moment to do this is through a multidisciplinary approach so you'll have access to a doctor physiotherapist psychologist maybe rehab counselor and dietician to help with the psychological physical and behavioral aspects of pain so they're going to check there's nothing wrong with you that we should be worried about they're going to teach you skills to turn down that dimmer switch so that your pain starts to reduce and give you skills like mindfulness and pasting your activities throughout the day so that you can at least keep your quality of life but there are three really big challenges with this approach the first is that we will usually only have these kind of expert services in a community or a town or a city that's big enough to support it and so that means that if you live in a country area or outside an urban center you're probably going to have to travel and if you have pain a long drive will probably make your pain worse the second issue is that when it comes to pain early intervention matters whereas wait lists for public hospitals can be upwards of 12 months plus people go to pain clinic and then they leave and they don't actually practice the skills necessarily long enough to get any benefits so folks I am here today to tell you about a solution that has worked for me and many others you can do it at home you can do it in the seer you can do it in the country folks I am here to tell you you can do it in the town hall or your park it will help you with the physical aspects of pain the psychological and even those pesky habits that are making your pain worse does it sound good do you want to know what it is it's caused I was gonna say yoga yoga can help with your experience of pain through its combined effect on your body your mind and your perception of the world I had all over body pain for about ten years in my teens and my 20s I'd wake up in the morning feeling like I had been hit by a bus I suspect that it was brought on by glandular fever and stresses in my teens but I don't really know epigenetics tells us some of us are predisposed and something happens pains triggered maybe but at any rate at 20 I felt like my body was falling apart doctors had scanned every part of me there was nothing they could find wrong so they gave me vitamins and actually a heap of really good strategies for helping me calm things down but there was only so far that they could take me the rest was up to me so as you've probably guessed I had a yoga practice which I had to adapt really considerably for my new capacity but over time my practice allowed me to get to know my body again and kids it get to know myself and what that meant was that eventually I would run away to the circus so 2010 I'm hanging from a trapeze wearing a pink boa singing cows with guns and I'm looking out over this big church in Sheffield over this audience and I thinking to myself my god Rachel you just lifted a woman above your head and you did it on four hours sleep I think you're better that's right I said to myself but did you know that lots of people with pain are still being told the best they can do is managers that's terrible I said maybe we could do something about it yes we should let everybody know that they can run away to the circus if they want so I was going to change the world help everybody who wanted to run away to the circus metaphorically speaking do so and I ran away to France to study a degree in yogic education with Madame Marie and lay-by on this degree helps me learn how to make yoga accessible to diverse populations it particularly taught me the value of keeping yoga as yoga not trying to blur it not trying to confuse it with medical care because it's different and to take my personal experience and develop it into a coherent framework that will eventually turn into a yoga course for people with persistent pain so to tell you how we were taking yoga framework informed by medical information and use it to improve the lives of people who need it I'm going to take you into a very old Texas called the Yoga Sutras the Yoga Sutras were written down at least 2,000 years ago so it's the real deal and I think you'll find this useful especially if you're getting your yoga education from Instagram but the Yoga Sutras they tell us that our yoga practice has eight limbs so yoga posture the one that we're most familiar with thanks to Instagram here's a limb number three and this gives you your physical education so specifically for someone with pain we need to rebuild those pathways between the brain and the body but also learn how to move with less tension that might have come because of that fear that something's really wrong with you breathing pranayama works on the nervous system and for people with pain we need to calm the nervous system down so it's not responding to everything as danger that takes us into pratyahara since withdrawal where we're not affected by external stimuli so much so think about someone with pain where their nervous system is telling them everything around them is dangerous that then leads us into Dharana concentration the mind with pain is often anxious and then meditation and this stage called Samadhi that we often call bliss but let me take you into the very first two limbs of this eight limbs framework because these are the ones that I think are really important but a less well talked about and they're the Yama's and the jnanis and these are some guidelines around how to be with ourselves and be with others now because I want you all to be able to leave here and impress your friends over drinks on Friday night with your knowledge of yogic philosophy and Sanskrit I'm going to talk you through two of them so the two I want to speak to are our hymns o non-harming and such a truthfulness so they sound pretty straightforward you don't tell any lies you don't hurt people you're honest with yourself we need to get really practical what are these concepts mean in practice and so with someone with pain I want them to be able to move without making their pain worse but for many people that's not even something they can conceive of start your truthfulness am i being honest with myself about how much I do today so that I don't do too much but also that I don't do too little and hold myself back when it's really time to progress when you have pain or illness your whole world changes and this philosophical contemplation allows you to examine some of the beliefs you hold about your body and your life and to try out some new ones and thank you to this you know this practice we now have a lot of research that shows that yoga a regular practice can in fact reduce your pain including the related symptoms like fatigue and anxiety even the stress level the stress hormone cortisol which is often high when you have chronic pain so with this evidence now doctors are sending it sometimes it seems like everyone with pain to yoga which is really great right we can just all do yoga save the world but a lot of people with the very conditions that research says yoga can help our going to yoga and it's not changing things for them in fact some of them are saying Rachel I went to restorative yoga and it made my pain worse and I see three interlinked reasons why this is happening first of all we're sending people to yoga as a last resort their nervous systems are so sensitized and their sense of hopes so diminished that they don't do it regularly enough to get any of the benefits so clearly we can improve the way we're offering yoga as a pain care modality but I also realize that those three issues are the same ones that face health care professionals on a daily basis with their pain patients for the healthcare system as a whole we are spending more and more on pain and yet as many people as ever hurt pain is set to get worse as our population ages so I realized that to do something that would actually make a difference we would have to bring the healthcare profession along provide something that wasn't just a pain solution on a psychophysical level but that helped with this bigger socio-economic challenge that ears pain and that's why I started bringing yoga teachers and health professionals together not to work together but to learn together and through that they can offer pain sensitive yoga in their communities which means people don't have to drive across town or into the city to get some kind of care they've got almost immediate access to some pretty good pain management strategies and importantly it's a normal enjoyable activity that encourages you to do it often enough to get progress the kind of progress that makes more progress possible but the really exciting thing in all this is actually the kind of learning that is taking place because when we have our different fields sired by size it makes us question our beliefs and challenge what we think about pain and what the best thing is to do to actually have a difference in the world so the partnerships and knowledge sharing that happens between these practitioners means that they can work nimbly with very specific local communities in a way that a big system just can't you know doctors farmers with back pain in their 60s I've got different needs to kids with arthritis we can't go to school there programs for these different groups will have a time and a place and we don't need to spend billions rolling them out across the country but for that community at that time that program will be what enables them to move forward thank you [Applause]
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Channel: TEDx Talks
Views: 87,882
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Australia, Health, Pain
Id: hHrBFYhcQ6c
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Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)
Published: Mon Aug 21 2017
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