Paint your pain away

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Paint Away Your Pain

Measuring and characterizing pain so that it can be understood and treated is a real challenge in the medical world, with even the most sophisticated facilities and physicians resorting to simplistic scales using numbers and happy/sad faces to quantify the intensity of a particular patient's experience. Adding insult to injury is the matter of how isolated people with chronic pain often feel -- they not only must cope with the physical suffering, but also with the emotional toll of being set apart from the rest of the world, cut off from physical activities and feeling like a burden, a whiner, a nag. If only others could see chronic pain, the way you can look at an injury and imagine how bad it must hurt or watch the numbers rise on a thermometer and identify with how sick someone must be to have such a high fever. Just being understood often can

make people feel a little better and also help the doctor provide better treatment. One way this is being done today is through art.

HEALING ARTS

Many hospitals in this country now offer some form of art therapy as a way to help patients express what they are feeling, emotionally as well as physically. Of course, the experience of pain has long been portrayed on canvas. For decades, prominent Yale-trained surgeon and author Bernie Siegel, MD, has encouraged his patients to demonstrate through art how they felt about their illness and treatment.

I called Allan I. Basbaum, PhD, pain expert and chair of the department of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco. He is editor-in-chief of Pain, the medical journal of the International Association for the Study of Pain, which recently featured cover art from an online exhibition of work from people expressing their chronic pain. The cover was for a special issue on women and pain. (To view a sampling of the exhibition, go to www.painexhibit.com.)

Dr. Basbaum enumerated some of the immediate benefits he has seen patients derive from the exercise of demonstrating what pain feels like through artwork ...

It gives people a nonverbal way to express their problem without being judged or having others get fed up, figuratively rolling their eyes as if to say "there he/she goes again." Family and other loved ones are much more responsive to the person's suffering when they see it on paper, says Dr. Basbaum.

Doctors and other health care providers, who are often confounded on how to appropriately treat a patient with chronic pain, have more information to work with. Being able to express the level of pain through imagery can help a patient who may be under-medicated to make clear what he/she is feeling.

Art helps express the emotional content in the perception of pain, Dr. Basbaum said, which can have a healing effect. "Along with showing the physical aspect of pain, art allows people to express the powerful psychological aspects of the pain experience," he says. Because constant pain becomes part of a person's sense of self, making pain visible to the world helps them take ownership of it, often bringing some feeling of control.

THE ARTIST WITHIN If you have no ability or training in art, you may believe that attempting to draw physical and/or emotional pain is off-limits for you. But, Dr. Basbaum strongly disagrees -- lack of artistic ability or training doesn't matter in the least, he says. For instance, children who have limited ability to express in words what they are going through can demonstrate clearly what is happening to them just using stick figures. He recalls how several small children suffering from migraine headaches drew simple but insightful sketches of their pain -- one made a circle to represent his head and slashed a black X across it... another drew a similar circle head but added arrows piercing it. "Artistically speaking, some drawings of pain are good and some are not, but all of them are expressive," he says, and that, of course, is the goal.

If you find the concept interesting, but aren't sure how to get started, here are some ideas to experiment with:

Create a self portrait, using any materials (or pictures of items) you'd like. One suggestion from a Web site called the Art Therapy blog (www.arttherapyblog.com) is to use a brown paper bag as the starting point and draw, paint and decorate with bits of fabric and whatever else you find evocative of your experience.

Make a collage, using materials (or pictures of items) that have relevance to your pain (for instance, a prescription label, string tied in knots, a photo of a sharp knife) to express the intensity, frequency or any other aspect of pain that you find particularly overwhelming.

Keep a "sketchbook diary" of drawings describing your experience with pain, including times you are immobilized and/or times you can function more normally. Don't limit yourself to literal images -- try playing with patterns, scribbles, words and letters, or anything else that comes to mind. (See more ideas on releasing stress through drawing at http://stress.about.com/od/funandgames/a/learningtodraw.htm.)

Dr. Basbaum says that he sees no negatives to the practice of using art to express pain. "It's like chicken soup," he says, "there is no downside."

Source(s):

Allan I. Basbaum, PhD, chair of the department of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco, and editor-in-chief of Pain.

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