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Controlling through Psychological Methods

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Please help with describing ways of controlling pain through psychological methods, as well as advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

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The solution discusses controlling through psychological methods.

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Same here: take these as an outline. The literature here is massive. the dominant means of dealing with this are CBT and basic behaviorism. They are not totally dissimilar, and the research on them is hopeful.

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Pain Management Though Psychology:
Advantages and Disadvantages

Pain is not merely a physical stimulus followed by a mental response. It is holistic and affects the entire person and even their environment. Dealing with pain through psychology includes such methods as relaxation techniques, cognitive methods and behavioral methods. All three of these are methods of dealing with pain through learning proper reactions to pain's presence. Pain can lead to depression and feelings of hopelessness, adding mental to physical sources of suffering. The basic point is through remolding one's reactions (including how one represents the pain to one's own consciousness), it can both be controlled at its source and its effects on the mind mitigated.

In general terms, behavioral methods are designed to alter the activities of the sufferer so that pain and its mental effects are mitigated. Certain rewards or other incentives for distracting oneself from pain, for example, are common. This is the basic operant conditioning model: one wants to associate positive (or at least neutral) responses to the onset of pain. Cognitive methods are about thoughts, and these seek to change the way pain is perceived. Clearly, these are not mutually exclusive.

Turner and Clancy (1988) have shown that CBT is effective in dealing with persistent and chronic pain (the lower back, in ...

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