Originally Posted by
bemyself 
I can't recall if it's been mentioned already, Davey, but I wonder if you might find the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn helpful. He started up a thing years ago (at U of Massachusetts hospital I think) to train people in chronic pain in mindfulness meditation.
I bought one of his CD's a while ago - pretty cheap, and is effectively like being in a guided meditation class, and explicitly for coping with bad pain.
I have practiced meditation for many years, even before I had problems with alcohol, although I've only recently gotten into the mindfulness stuff. It helps a bit with the pain but there are limits to it's use.
To give you an idea of the level of pain I'm in i'll use two situations.
Let's say you have a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being agony and 1 being no pain at all. Years ago I injured myself and switched up the wound with fishing line because I didn't want to go to hospital, no aanesthetic obviously. That I would rate a 3 on the pain scale.
Before suffering this illness I was very active and once I dislocated my shoulder. We were in the middle of nowhere, 2 days from help so my only choice was to relocate it. None of us had medical training, we only had a rough idea of how to do it. Several tries later it popped back in, no pain killers used. That I would put at an 8 on the pain scale.
My daily level of pain varies between a 5 and a 9, with different parts of my body affected to varying degrees, but every muscle is painful. So as you can imagine, meditation doesn't do much
