Ep 6. Sensitization

Learn how central sensitization really presents. And yes, it’s a big deal that is currently essentially glossed over due to the lack of identification and treatments.

The symptom clusters this type of pain creates long term are diseases caused by the central nervous system. The issue is that we currently lack an effective way to investigate and treat the various ways nervous system dysfunction impacts patients beyond the accepted definition of nociplastic pain.

We share our model for categorizing central sensitization currently into various buckets including but not limited to:

• Sensory Hypersensitivity

• Sleep Disturbance

• Fatigue Disturbance

• Cognitive Dysfunction

• Mood Dysfunction

• Dysautonomias etc

All of these being largely undefined and not connected, lead patients down a rabbit hole of diagnoses. What we need instead, is a language to talk about symptoms providers are able to pull out of the patients' summary so we can efficiently investigate, and go through first to third line interventions with this presentations just like other types of pain.

We’ll go through an example of first and second line management strategies with sleep disturbance and orthostatic intolerance so you get a sense of how we prioritize interventions, and can attack these vague yet persistent symptoms much more effectively as a patient or provider.