Biochemical basis for chronic pain

This article doesn't consider TMS as a cause of chronic pain but it does describe a chemical pain loop that develops in chronic pain sufferers and how this loop can cause physical damage even once the original injury has healed.

http://theconversation.edu.au/what-causes-chronic-pain-microglia-might-be-to-blame-6173

Rather than resorting to drugs, like the article suggests, I like to think that shedding stress, tension and repressed emotions might allow your microglia to be "good" again.

 

Yes, if you're really psychologically stressed out (or you reinjure an old injury) it's much easier to develop a chronic pain syndrome. But blocking the bad chemical reaction doesn't sound like it would permanently block the pain if the same psychological stress factors still persisted in your personal environment. Sure, you'd feel better for a couple of weeks, but then the symptoms would just return again. That's the whole problem of treating chronic pain as a "disease" in a nutshell! I know a newspaper reporter in Pakistan who told me that as a little girl when her grandmother was suffering from depression, the docs gave the old lady Prozac. Then, the reporter told me that she can remember her grandmother beating her with a stick, all the while with a funny, intoxicated grin on her wrinkled face! That's symptomatic treatment for you: you get rid of the old lady's depression, but her anger and rage are still lurking there beneath the surface.