Out here in the perimeter there are no stars
Chronic pain is associated with a loss of the normal capacity to know where your body is. Chronic pain is also associated with odd bodily feelings. To find out if people with chronic back pain had trouble ‘feeling’ their back, they were asked to draw on a piece of paper the outline of where they felt their back to be. This is a bit tricky to understand, but imagine you are surveying, in your head, how your body feels and then drawing its location. Anyway, you might have to read the paper to really get it. This is what we found: six out of six patients with low back pain, when they were trying to draw where they felt their back to be, said “I can’t find it” or “I’ve lost it”. When an independent investigator assessed sensory acuity on the back, sensory acuity was reduced in the same place the patient couldn’t feel properly. (…)
In short we think it demonstrates that chronic back pain is associated with distorted body image of the back.
