Beauty, Health and Lifestyle with Denise McNamara

After enduring chronic pain for years without any relief, Dunmore native Vincent Joyner decided to dedicate himself to finding a solution that would make his life worth living. After studying hotel management at the then RTC and later an MBA at Cornell University and ESSEC in France, he worked his way up to top level management in huge hotel groups across the world – most recently working as Vice President at Marriott Hospitality Corporation.

But then he found himself paralysed with pain.

He recalls attending a meeting in Washington DC in 2019 when he felt a strange pain in his neck. He was also uncharacteristically uninterested in food so when he returned to his home in Johannesburg in South Africa he immediately went to the doctor.

They found he was suffering from a viral infection, which was soon diagnosed as shingles. Tests later revealed he had ‘Rickettsia’, which is similar to Lyme disease that left him with damaged nerves in his face and jaw.

He then got a bad bout of Covid with enduring symptoms. As if all that weren’t enough, on his return to the home farm to see parents Celia and Patrick, he had a car accident that resulted in a compression fracture in the spine.

Vincent was reduced to “constant, life-altering and debilitating” chronic pain, he recalls.

“I took every painkiller imaginable and nothing worked. It all added up to 24 hours of pain, seven days a week. I went to see every kind of specialist – neurologists, anaesthesiologists, pain specialists, psychologists, chiropractors and nothing. They all had a little bit of information but none could join the dots.

“Then a pain psychologist suggested that my personality could be part of the problem – I was a perfectionist, I was solution-oriented, a go-getter. A GP said to me I had two choices – go with opioids and get addicted or learn to live with it. I just thought there has to be another way.”

He immersed himself in medical research, reviewing over 1,000 research articles on pain and related fields and it became crystal clear that the relationship between tissue damage, structural abnormalities and pain is far more complex than was generally understood.

“New research has revolutionised our understanding of chronic pain, particularly back pain. I learned that structural changes don’t often correlate with pain – one comprehensive review found that 37% of 20-year-olds and 96% of 80-year-olds who were completely pain-free showed disc degeneration on an MRI,” he explains.

“There are a host of psychosocial and neurological factors in pain – fear of movement often becomes more disabling than the pain itself and our nervous system can become oversensitive, leading to pain persistence even after tissue healing.”

Pictured: Vincent Joyner wants to help others break the cycle of chronic pain that threatened to destroy his own life.