Journey to Pain Relief

Description

Starts its journey by learning to combine different treatments,tapping into the body's inherent knowledge & ability to heal,increasing exercise ability, producing chemical substances in the body with acupuncture & electrical currents.- P.Berger (2003)

Review from David F. Mayor

A useful tool that empowers both the chronic pain sufferer and the therapist by providing hands-on information and advice on the treatment of pain

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This perceptive and inspiring book can be recommended for both patients and therapists, as its subtitle suggests.

Phyllis Berger, South African acupuncturist and physiotherapist, brings a wealth of experience, a great deal of energy, a keen mind and a compassionate heart to her topic – the treatment of acute and chronic pain.

Having to cope with her own pain has clearly empowered her in her work with others. Resourceful, always eager to learn, she has evolved a multimodal approach that involves her patients in their own process, together with the application of various methods of acupuncture and electroacupuncture (EA), magnet therapy, ‘modified direct current’ (APS), relaxation and breathing exercises, … prayer.

In the first few chapters of the book, Berger explores the causes of pain (neurophysiological, emotional, lifestyle, traumatic), stressing the importance of living with pain in a positive way rather than becoming resigned to it.

Always she emphasises the partnership between patient and practitioner, empowering the patient, explaining to the reader without talking down (or up!).

Her well-illustrated chapters on acupuncture show an eclectic approach (TCM, Gunn, Joseph Wong, Baldry). In addition to outlining treatments for different types and locations of pain, she offers acupuncture protocols for stress, inflammation, and for enhancing immune and autonomic function.

The chapters on TENS and modified direct current are also detailed and useful (although the chapter between, on various other electrotherapies, is comparatively sketchy).

Modified direct current using the APS (action potention stimulation) device was developed in South Africa in the 1990s, and will be unfamiliar to most acupuncturists or physiotherapists elsewhere.

The output is a ‘combination of direct and alternating current’ (0-150 Hz, 0-4 mA), a monophasic square wave with exponential decay. It appears to have effects additional to those of TENS, for instance on circulation, and can be combined with acupuncture, EA and other forms of electrotherapy.

The end chapters of the book describe the author’s multimodal approach in depth, with some detailed case studies, outlining the coping skills that can be developed by patients who have to live with chronic pain and the exercises that will be useful to them.

In the final chapter, Phyllis Berger gives a brief account of her own journey to an understanding of pain and of how she has developed her approach to its treatment.

Overall, this is a very useful resource for both patients and practitioners (acupuncturists, physiotherapists), well written to appeal to both – although possibly a little pricy for patients.

However, the emphasis on modified direct current will limit its relevance for many who do not use this or similar forms of electrotherapy.

Although Berger is not shy of quoting the evidence for the treatments she recommends (yes, even prayer), I remain unconvinced that APS is really superior to other forms of electrotherapy for conditions such as ankylosing spondylitis or osteoporotic fractures, as she claims. In this instance, as in her coverage of the Korean Acu-Touch device (actively marketed in South Africa, and by South Africans elsewhere), I wonder if enthusiasm has got the better of her discrimination.

On the other hand, it is precisely her enthusiasm that makes this book a delight.

Even if my left brain would have preferred something with a glossary, a more comprehensive bibliography, an index, and a little less effusiveness, my right brain is very comfortable with the book.

And if, like the Liverpool taxi driver whose case she describes so movingly, I myself had an intractable pain problem, I know where I would go for treatment, and to learn the use of tools to deal with it.

David F Mayor

David Mayor is an acupuncturist working in Hertfordshire. His textbook on electroacupuncture will be published by Churchill Livingstone in 2005.

28.07.04

Date reviewed

11/12/2003

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