The Answer to Impossible Pain

Pain Free for Life
by Scott Brady, M.D., William Proctor

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The proof of the power of our program in overcoming various symptoms of the Autonomic Overload Syndrome lies in the results of the 6-week Pain-Free for Life Treatment Program. This program has helped hundreds of patients suffering from the chronic, "impossible-to-cure" pains of AOS to achieve significant relief within weeks-without drugs or surgery.

In a recent research project we conducted at the Brady Institute, we studied fifty-five patients who had suffered from debilitating and seemingly incurable chronic pain-all of whom I had examined and diagnosed with Autonomic Overload Syndrome. These patients had experienced chronic pain on average for twelve years. We found that more than 80 percent of these subjects experienced 80 to 100 percent pain recovery within four to six weeks of beginning our treatment plan.

Also, with the passage of time, their pain relief continued to hold firm, according to two-month and six-month follow-up surveys. The various AOS pain complaints that we studied and cured included chronic back pain, fibromyalgia, chronic neck and shoulder pain, sciatic nerve pain, migraine headaches, tension headaches, and the painful spasms of irritable bowel syndrome. Significant AOS-related symptoms, such as insomnia and skin conditions like psoriasis, also frequently disappeared.

Here is a sampling of patient comments that lie behind the numbers:

• An elderly retiree with chronic lower back pain and herniated disks for ten years reported, "Doc, I was cured in three weeks."

• A woman in her early forties, with sciatic pain running down her hip and leg for seven years, wrote: "My sciatic pain is fi- nally gone-I can sit in the movie theater, play tennis, and my husband and I are going to Europe."

• An attorney in his thirties with chronic back pain for three years declared after four weeks: "I'm off my medicines, and I'm 80 percent better. And I'm playing golf again."

• A twenty-five-year-old female with debilitating fibromyalgia for eight years said, "I've finally got my life back. I'm going back to school without pain for the first time in years. Last week I began to have a migraine headache-and I was able to make it go away within minutes!"

Such results in my practice-and also in the work of other physicians who employ mind-body techniques-have convinced me that traditional medicine is too narrowly focused to help cure millions of patients who suffer with seemingly incurable pain. I call today's traditionally practiced medicine "body" medicine because we physicians have been trained to focus almost exclusively on the physical without giving attention to psychological or spiritual factors that influence the body. While I believe that our current medical practice is the best the world has ever seen, our narrow structural focus often precludes us from solving many common conditions. Consider just a few limitations of today's conventional medicine:

• We will soon help the average person to live to be ninety or a hundred . . . but millions suffer from chronic back pain- costing billions of dollars each year in health care costs and lost work productivity.

• Body medicine can replace knees and hips and transplant kidneys . . . but it can't offer lasting relief to millions of people, such as the many patients, the majority of whom are women, who suffer from the debilitating painful muscle condition known as fibromyalgia.

• Traditional medicine can block stomach acid with pills . . . but it can't cure gastritis or irritable bowel syndrome once and for all, so that pills are no longer necessary.

• Conventional medicine can remove brain tumors . . . but it can't permanently cure migraine or tension headaches.

Yet all these limitations often fall away when people in chronic pain are examined and treated with a well-designed mind-body- spirit approach. A new and better medicine will emerge only when patients are treated as a whole-with attention paid not just to the body, but to the mind and the spirit as well. Yet it's important to remember that there's really nothing new about this approach. In fact, the seemingly new path I've taken in my practice represents the culmination of landmark pain-related research that has spanned the past century and a half.

A Medical Revolution in the Making

In the past fifty to seventy-five years, modern medical technology, research, and treatment have focused almost exclusively on the structural or anatomical explanations of pain and disease. Tremendous strides have been made in developing new drugs that have provided a quick fix for many pain symptoms and complaints. But pills that must be taken for indefinite periods are not "cures." Rather, they provide temporary relief of chronic pains that have not been fully corrected or fully understood.

Likewise, once such high-tech tools as the MRI and CT (computerized tomography) scans were invented, physicians fell into another body-medicine error when they concluded, "Anything I can't actually see must not be the cause of the pain." Or, even worse, "If I see something that looks a little abnormal, that must be the cause of the pain."

Copyright © 2006 by Scott Brady, MD

About the Author

Scott Brady, M.D., has spent the last decade developing his holistic, noninvasive treatments for chronic or recurrent pain. In 1998, he founded the Brady Institute for Health at Florida Hospital, where his powerful techniques have helped hundreds of patients overcome debilitating pain that routine therapies have failed to heal. Dr. Brady and his family live in Orlando, Florida.