Alternative Information

In this group are included pain in the back, neck, shoulder, arm, elbow, wrist, hand, hip, leg, knee, ankle, foot, and other extremities.)

If you've had back pain or pain in an extremity for more than 90 days and haven't seen a doctor, you need to do so right away. If you've already seen one and have ruled out illness as the cause but still can't get relief, you might try asking your subconscious for help.

With persistent back and extremities pain it's important to rule out arthritis, fibromyalgia, neuropathic pain (nerve pain) and other disorders as the cause--and only a physician can do that. But once you determine that those illnesses are not involved, which seems to be the case for most chronic back pain, the list of causes may narrow to a fairly specific group.

Engaging the Subconscious

It may be possible to focus your subconscious on those causes through the use of visualization statements.

Visualization statements represent the specific language that your subconscious wants you to read back to it to help ease your pain. They're simple and are targeted directly at the main factors that could bring you relief.

You can obtain these statements by learning how to communicate directly with your own subconscious mind. The process is straightforward and can be done at home by working with a facilitator over the telephone. You you need no special skills and no previous experience in working with the subconscious.

If you have back or extremity pain, here are some important areas on which to focus your subconscious:

Muscle Strain

The spine is made of bone, and you would think that it should be able to support itself. But it's made of 24 separate vertebrae, and actually can't hold itself up--to do so it needs tendons and ligaments, and especially the back muscles. When these muscles become overused, injured, or strained, they don't have the option of taking themselves offline.

Yet to ease the pain they may need to become more supple and relaxed. Visualization could be an effective way for you to accomplish this. It's possible to visualize the relaxation of the entire back or specific muscle groups, whichever your subconscious thinks will be most useful.

Nerve Pressure

Each of the 24 vertebrae in the spine has nerves running through a vertical hole in the middle of it, and protruding from the sides of it. The vertebrae are separated from one another by discs of cartilage that act as shock absorbers. When you have a herniated disc, misaligned joint or other condition that puts pressure on a nerve, it causes pain.

You may be able to use visualizations to help ease this pain by focusing the subconscious on aligning the joints and relieving the pressure on the nerves. Only a slight release of pressure may be enough to produce relief.

Tendon and Ligament Strain

Tendons are used to tie muscles to bones, while ligaments fasten bones to other bones. When these binding structures are injured, strained, or overused, they tend to lose their flexibility and become painful. They don't have their own blood supply, so directing more blood to them doesn't usually help. Drinking more water may, since they do absorb water.

Visualizations may be one way to increase the suppleness of your tendons and ligaments. By feeding the subconscious back its own statements about the flexibility of particular tendons and ligaments, or all of them in general, you may be able to relax them enough to relieve pain.

Reducing the Pain Signal

Imbalances of the musculoskeletal system such as the above are a major trigger of pain signals in back and extremities pain. Putting the system back in balance is thus a preventive measure, one that helps to keep the pain signal from being generated in the first place.

But an important part of your pain relief strategy also needs also to be to attempt to reduce the pain signal once it has been generated. This can be approached by focusing the subconscious on numerous chemical weak points (we call them leverage points) where it may be possible to use visualizations to reduce the pain signal.

Using the Subconscious to Try to Gain Leverage

If you can learn to engage your subconscious, you most likely will be able to identify which leverage points apply to you. You can then use visualization statements to give your subconscious the daily reinforcement it needs to possibly take the edge off your pain at those points.

Ben Plumb is CEO and President of The Visualization Group, Inc. The company's service is delivered by people like himself who personally suffered from years of chronic pain, and used the visualization method described in this article to obtain relief when nothing else worked.