Texas Orthopedics’ own Dr. Barbara Bergin was recently featured on Forbes.com. She lent her voice to an article about meditation as a way to deal with chronic pain. Meditation is the practice of training the mind to promote relaxation and/or a heightened sense of clarity and focus.
Treatment for severe or chronic pain costs upwards of $600 million a year according to the Institute of Medicine, and overdosing, on pain medications and similar drugs, kills more Americans than car crashes.
With many doctors now trying to steer patients away from narcotic medications due to addiction and potential side effects, meditation and mindfulness have become increasingly popular alternatives for pain management. This is something Dr. Bergin has been prescribing for years.
“I read and article about it in a magazine and realized it was describing what I had already been teaching my patients: that they should focus on situations in which they do not have pain, recognize those situations and try to reproduce those painless episodes. Before reading about mindfulness, I used to tell them to live in the pain-free moment when they identified those moments,” said Dr. Bergin.
Mindfulness, and meditation, can empower patients and provide them some control over their pain, rather than solely relying on painkillers.
As Dr. Bergin further explained, they are just one “modality,” to help manage pain, but one that is proving more successful every day.
You can view the full article featuring Dr. Bergin right here.
(Courtesy of Forbes.com)
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