Coping With Chronic Pain Through Online Support Groups

Coping With Chronic Pain Through Online Support Groups

Chronic and acute pain is different in the sense that acute pain triggers our nervous system to a possible injury and the need to take care of it. For example, if we fall and break our foot, we stay down till we get help moving to a safe place then go to the doctor and have it set in a cast with no movement until it is healed. Most of the time, it will not have any long lasting or permanent affects. Chronic pain however persists. The pain signals keep firing into our nervous system. This feeling can last for months and for some people it can last a lifetime. It becomes the primary focus of a person’s life. His or her family, occupation and relationships are greatly influenced in a negative way. There are times when a person with chronic pain spends more time searching to find some reason or significance for the pain and why it is happening to them and them alone.   Below is a diagram of the cycle that most chronic pain sufferers experience.

 

 

It is important for this person to know they are not alone and that there are others out there with the same financial, physical, emotional and stressful issues that come with living with chronic pain. I have loved ones in my life who have chronic pain and I have often encouraged them to find others who suffer similar chronic pain by support groups either online or in our community. In my marriage, for example, my husband’s pain has led to many frustrating nights of him not being able to get a good night’s rest and myself wanting him to sleep so I can be rested in the morning. This leads to frustration on both our parts and puts a strain on our marriage sometimes. It seems to me that if he could talk to someone who has chronic pain, it would help him emotionally and psychologically.  Patricia Wallace writes in her book “People on the net are willing to help one another in small and sometimes very large ways. Helpful replies to requests for information are extremely common, and the willingness of so many to provide assistance is one of the main reasons people participate in online discussion forums.” (Wallace pg. 190) For example: if a person’s back hurt in the middle of the night and they were finding it hard to sleep, they could get online and chat with a person who perhaps is having the same difficulty and could support and share sleep remedies. It would be easy for someone in the family, perhaps interrupted by the person who is suffering to say “it is all in your head, go back to bed” but an online chat room, group forum or website with other persons  who are also finding it hard to sleep due to pain could offer immediate and positive support.

In a report from Empowering Processes and Outcomes of Participation in Online Support Groups for Patients With Breast Cancer, Arthritis, or Fibromyalgia it states that patient reported outcomes mentioned were: being better informed, feeling confident in the relationship with their physician, their treatment, and their social environment; improved acceptance of the disease; increased optimism and control; enhanced self-esteem and social well-being; and collective action. This article demonstrates that participation in online support groups can make a valuable contribution to the emergence of empowered patients.

Divorce is at a high rate in our society. Chronic pain causes stress which can sometimes lead to divorce because both the sufferer and the spouse have no outside support and feel alone in the cycle of chronic pain. If support groups, online or face to face, were suggested and prescribed by physicians, could we see a decrease in divorce that stems from one or both spouses suffering the chronic pain cycle? Would pain sufferers and caregivers have less stress in their life which would lower anxiety and other medical issues?

Wallace, P. (1999). The Psychology of the Internet (p. 190). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Cornelia F Van Uden-Krann. Empowering Processes and Outcomes of Participation in Online Support Groups for Patients with Breast Cancer, Arthritis, or Fibromyaliga. Qaulitive Health Research. May 8, 2013. http://qhr.sagepub.com