Dealing With Chronic Pain Management

Video Transcript

"Hi. Are you like many people suffering from chronic pain? Well if you are, you're in the right place. We're going to learn, today, some skills on how to manage chronic pain. I'm Isabelle Simon. I'm a wellness consultant, and I'm going to provide you some tips. First, understand what chronic pain is. It comes from inflammation in some areas of the body that come either from repetitive motion, that you do day in, day out, and it creates wear and tear in some joints, areas of the body. Or it can come from an injury. You may have been injured in a car accident, and you've got scar tissues, and now you've got chronic pain. So how to manage that chronic pain is very important for, you know, quality of life. Something, and the first thing that is probably the one most important way of managing chronic pain, is ensuring you're hydrated. Chronic dehydration will create chronic pain. If you don't know that already, the right amount of water for you to drink is half your body weight in ounces of water. If you're 200 pounds, divide that by two, a hundred ounces of water per day. If that seems like a lot and you're far away from that goal, build up to it. I guarantee you, just getting hydration, hydrated properly will take care of probably 80% of your chronic pain. Number two, you will want to make sure that you relax and you sleep well. A stressed person who is very tired, the muscles will tend to tense up. And that will aggravate the pain. So go relax, do something fun. Of course, there is many other things, like supplementation of omega-3s. Some people take glucosamine, which can help as well. You have some different types of creams that you can put directly on the area. You can put some, you know let's say you have shoulder pain, you can ice it down. Because if you have pain, that means there is inflammation there. But also, I would look at what triggers that chronic pain. Because those are ways to manage it, but the best way to manage it is to make sure that it doesn't come back. And so you may want to keep like a little journal or a log to keep track of when the pain happens more often. If it's after the end of the day, when you spent all day at the computer, you may need to some more breaks there and stretch it out. So those are some ways to manage chronic pain, and I hope that you learned something new today. I'm Isabelle Simon, your wellness consultant."