Managing the Unmanageable

I have posted recently about how managing pain has - almost exclusively - become the main focus of my life. It dominates my existence every single day of my life.

But, given that we have no idea how it works or why it has become a chronic problem, how exactly can I and my Medical Team actually create a plan to manage pain?

Well...that's a really good question and not an easy one to answer. The easiest way to describe it is this: We are not trying to cure the pain - that would be impossible. What we are trying to do is manage the pain and mitigate its impact by undertaking various strategic actions. Anyone familiar with the theory of marginal gains will recognise the approach. We are trying to undertake a range of actions with the hope that each individual action will generate a small improvement; and that when we aggregate all of those small improvements, it will lead to a significant improvement overall.

These strategic actions are not necessarily what we would call "medical treatments", although in some cases, we are using targeted medications to support the process.

As regular readers and viewers (you can see the videos at www.gibboblog.uk) will recall, we started by trying to address my sleep patterns. Sleep is critical to managing pain because when we sleep, the body repairs itself and 'resets'. Of course it is a vicious circle because we need to sleep for the body to repair itself but the constant pain means that the patient cannot enter the sleep phase where the body starts to undertake repairs.

Next we started to address the psychology of pain and as ever, I will refer you all to Dr Lorimer Moseley (if you've never read/ listened to him before, start here and then keep searching for his material), but essentially, the psychological approach is where we start to change the way the brain behaves or reacts under certain stimulae and therefore stop it from interpreting things as "pain". It's fascinating stuff and it's probably the activity that I'm enjoying most. I'll probably do a separate video about it at a later time.

So the next tactic we are using is weight loss. Now before you all rise up and remind me that in 2024 I underwent a significant weight loss programme, lost two stone and it had absolutely no positive impact on my pain experience (in fact, the pain got significantly worse at that time, but the two things were not related - one was not a cause of the other), let me explain.

Carrying too much weight puts a lot of strain on the body, both skeletally and generally. We know from the experience and study of overweight people that they generally experience pain as a result of their obesity. So it's not exactly a "if we do this it will help" tactic. It's more of a "it can't hurt, can it?" tactic. If nothing else, it will remove the pain levels caused by being overweight leaving us with 'just' the chronic pain to deal with.

I started on a sensible diet allied to an exercise regime last November and you can follow my progress either on here or via the videos at www.gibboblog.uk. My big target is to get back down to 16 stone but that is a long way off. The short term target is to lose 10% of my body weight by mid May 2026.

Wish me luck!

Stay Strong. Fight Hard. Laugh Lots.