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Another New Study Says Positive Thinking Can
Overcome Pain
Sept. 7, 2005 – The second study in just over a
week says we really can make pain go away by truly thinking it will. The
first study involved subjects who were given placebos they thought would
relieve their pain – and it did. The new study says that when it comes
to controlling pain, positive thinking can be as powerful as a shot of
morphine. Lowering participants’ expectations about pain levels reduced
both pain-related brain activity and how much pain they felt.
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It could be good news for senior citizens, many
living with pain, who are concerned about the recent health warnings on
many commonly used pain-relieving drugs. The trick is getting your mind
to really believe the pain will disappear.
The latest study is new brain imaging research done
at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. The results are
reported on-line this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences.
“We found that expectations have a surprisingly big
effect on pain. Positive expectations produced about a 28 percent
decrease in pain ratings – equal to a shot of morphine,” said Tetsuo
Koyama, M.D., Ph.D, a post-doctoral fellow and lead author of the study.
The study involved 10 normal, healthy volunteers
who had a heat stimulator applied to their legs while their brains were
being scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a
technology that shows which areas of the brain are being activated.
In a training session, researchers taught
participants to expect three different levels of painful heat stimuli
after a timed interval. A seven-second interval signaled a heat level
that caused mild pain (115 degrees Fahrenheit), a 15-second interval
signaled a heat level that produced moderate pain (118 degrees) and a
30-second interval signaled a heat level that produced severe pain (122
degrees). Since the heat stimuli were on for only 20 seconds, none of
them were hot enough to cause burns or damage to the skin.
One or two days after training, participants
underwent 30 different heat trials that were monitored with fMRI. About
a third of the time, the researchers mixed the signals for the pain
levels, so that participants were expecting one temperature, but
actually received either a higher or lower temperature.
When participants expecting moderate pain were
exposed to the severe heat level, their ratings of pain intensity were
28 percent lower than on the trials where they were expecting a high
level of pain and actually received it. All 10 subjects had diminished
pain intensity when they expected lower levels of pain.
“Expectations of decreased pain powerfully reduced
both the subjective experience of pain and activation of pain-related
brain regions,” said Robert Coghill, Ph.D., the senior author of the
study and a neuroscientist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine,
which is part of the Medical Center.
Brain regions activated during expectations of pain
overlapped partially with those activated during pain, which suggests
that there is are crucial brain regions that allow expectations to shape
the processing of information from the body.
“We don’t experience pain in a vacuum,” Coghill
said. “Pain is not solely the result of signals coming from an injured
body region, but instead emerges from the interaction between these
signals and cognitive information unique to every individual.”
He said that the identification of brain regions
that can allow cognitive factors such as expectations to shape incoming
sensory information may lead to increased acceptance of cognitive and
behavioral treatments for pain by patients, physicians and insurers.
“We need to find ways to optimize these treatments,” Coghill said. “Pain
needs to be treated with more than just pills. The brain can powerfully
shape pain, and we need to exploit its power.”
The research was funded by the National Institute
of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
Coghill’s other colleagues on the research were
John McHaffie, Ph.D., a neuroscientist, and Paul J. Laurienti, M.D.,
Ph.D., a radiologist, from Wake Forest Baptist. Next, Coghill would like
to learn how optimists and pessimists differ in their perceptions of
pain.
About Wake Forest University Baptist Medical
Center: Wake Forest Baptist is an academic health system comprised of
North Carolina Baptist Hospital and Wake Forest University Health
Sciences, which operates the university’s School of Medicine. The system
comprises 1,187 acute care, psychiatric, rehabilitation and long-term
care beds and is consistently ranked as one of “America’s Best
Hospitals” by U.S. News & World Report.
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