A recent Scientific American article stated: "Though often denigrated as fakery or wishful thinking, hypnosis has been shown to be a real phenomenon with a variety of therapeutic uses -- especially in controlling pain"

Pain is an experience that blights many lives and comes in many forms. Chronic pain is often classified as pain that persists for a period of a month or more beyond normal recovery time of an illness, or pain that persists for several months or years as a result of a chronic condition, and can be of any intensity. Even low-level chronic pain can be debilitating. Acute pain is a short-lived condition within normal experience of an acute illness or injury. Breakthrough pain is a transitory flare of pain of moderate to severe intensity occurring on a background of otherwise controlled pain.

Pain originates in nervous system and clearly has a useful role to play in development of avoidance strategies for situations and experiences that can cause us harm. However, multiple factors can conspire to produce sensation of pain in situations where information is no longer useful. It is obvious that in some injuries and illnesses, brain receives information about pain that person experiencing that pain is able to do very little about in terms of avoiding stimuli. What is not so obvious is that conscious experience of pain is modified by many other factors such as memory, emotion, and physical condition. In other words, experience of pain is determined by context in which that pain takes place. This further complicated by fact that some pain cannot be found to have an organic (disease or injury) related cause at all.

Milton Erickson described pain as a construct that consisted past remembered pain, present pain experience and of anticipated pain in future. These combine to give meaning that pain has for us, and this is one of reasons that chronic pain (of any intensity) can be so debilitating. Nothing will intensify one's experience of pain as much as anticipation that it will be there tomorrow, and day after and so on. Similarly, learning to relax and simply let go of anticipation and fear can result in remarkable changes in our experience of pain.

As a child, I suffered several bouts of recurring osteomyelitis, a bone marrow infection that was often accompanied by high fever and severe pain. The pain persisted as a result of deformations of bone that took place and necessary surgery, but I learned very early on that I could alter my own experience of pain through what I considered back then to be a number of mental tricks. I did not know what I know now about nature of pain but I was able to effect some remarkable changes to my experience of pain, which laid foundations for my current understanding of nature of experience.

So, let's look at a few techniques that we can use to experience pain differently, and take some control over how it affects our lives.

Relaxation and Trance

That procedure was known as a Myelogram, there was a injection of a substance called "Myodil" into spinal cavity for diagnosis purposes. The body was then tipped in all directions so that fluid would go to all areas inside spine and then would show up, as it had fluorescent properties. The idea was great, it opened up all sorts of possibilities, with a correct diagnosis being one of main achievements.