Do you believe in pain?

When I was recovering from my very serious car accident during my college years, I was sent to a therapist.  I don't recall her official title, psychiatrist or physiciatrist or whatever, but I thought quite a bit of the time was unimportant.  However, she did help me overcome my fear of being the car with someone else driving, giving me coping strategies.  The other thing that we spent some well-worth it time on was pain management techniques.

When I went to the physical therapist a while ago, he kind of brought me back to that time.  He was talking about listening to your body and how pain is telling you about unresolved issues and so on.  As I have previously mentioned, his office is the only place I found medical professionals who actually made any effort to help me address my pain issues rather than dismissing them, and me.  When I do not address my pain issue early, or I have just overdone it to the point that I can't prevent it, my pain will sometimes cause me to get what I'm gathering is a migraine--a horrible headache that comes with nauseau, weakness, and seeing stars, according to patient comments.

The WSJ reported on a conference of the American Headache Society, discussing the stages of migraines and the research that shows that maybe they can be prevented if the signs can be identified.  The interesting part is that some of the things thought to be triggers may actually be symptoms of the coming migraine.  Food cravings may be a symptom rather than the trigger.  So listening to the body or recognizing the signs can help prevent the big showdown between a person and their body.  I alternate between listening to and ignoring what my body has to say.  It's hard to listen in the midst of a love/hate relationship.  But I continue to work on my listening skills.

Side note: based on one of the article comments, MSG is an ingredient I have tried to eliminate from my diet.  I have a friend who cannot eat it, and I could not believe some of the foods containing it.  Well, there are even more than I thought--it can be labeled as anything with "glutamate" as well as any version of hydrolyzed protein, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, yeast extract, soy protein, etc.  If it's not one thing, it's a dozen others!