Although Dr. Robert Bonakdar, director of pain management at the Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine in La Jolla, Calif., says he hears this kind of thinking about alternative approaches, there's no truth to it. He also often hears that patients think they need to choose either a conventional medical route or an alternative one to manage pain, but in his opinion it's fine to blend the two.
Bonakdar likes to make a distinction between active alternative pain relief methods, such as biofeedback, guided imagery, exercise, yoga and other mind-body approaches, and passive ones, including acupuncture and massage.
In an active approach, he said, the patient "owns" the pain-relief technique. In other words, if you are using biofeedback to help relieve chronic headaches, patients first learn the tool and can put this active tool to use whenever they need to ease their pain. Active approaches are "self-dosed," Bonakdar said.
On the other hand, in a passive approach, pain relief is dependent on a visit to a practitioner so there's a reliance on someone else for treatment.
If a patient has tried a passive method for pain, Bonakdar says he might ask, "Did you do a full course of treatment for pain relief and did you transition to anything active?" For example, he says, in most of the better research trials on the use of acupuncture for pain relief, the patient received 12 to 20 treatment sessions.
Of course, having reasonable expectations is a good idea, whether the pain relief method is an alternative approach or a conventional one, such as a drug.
"If a person was taking a pain medication and stopped it, they wouldn't expect the pain-relief effect to last," Bonakdar said. The same holds true for alternative approaches to pain.
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