MBE honour for Mylor pain relief advisor
9:00am Saturday 20th October 2012 in News
Jan Sadler presented with her MBE by the Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall Colonel Edward Bolitho in front of her husband Colin Sadler and family members
A woman who has helped thousands of others cope with pain by sharing her experiences has been presented with an MBE at the Pandora Inn.
Jan Sadler, who lives in nearby Mylor Bridge, was not well enough to travel to London to receive the award so Colonel Edward Bolitho, who as Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall is the Queen’s representative in the county, performed the honours.
Mrs Sadler said she was “so proud and thrilled” to be presented with the award, which was announced in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in June for her services to pain management and setting up the PainSupport website.
Mrs Sadler said: “It’s a real honour and not just for me. It’s wonderful that the work I've been doing for all these years is being recognised and acknowledged as so valuable.
“Hopefully it will help to bring more attention to the needs of those of us who live with pain daily and allow even more people to reach my website who may currently be struggling with their pain.”
Mrs Sadler’s story is a classic example of how someone can turn adversity into opportunity, as her work on pain management resulted directly from her suffering a serious back injury 30 years ago, as the result of a fall. This left her with sciatica and nerve pain from her back to her toes.
After trying many different treatments, including a major operation, Jan’s consultant finally told her that there was nothing more that could be done and that she must go home and “learn to live with it”.
At that time there was little help available so Jan set about finding methods of reducing and managing the pain herself without having to resort to a dependence on pain killing drugs that caused her major side effects. So successful was her research into managing pain that in 1997 she gathered all her ideas together and published a book on pain management called “Natural Pain Relief”, which has since been published in the USA as well under the name of “Pain Relief Without Drugs”.
She set up a website, painsupport.co.uk, to include a discussion forum where issues could be aired and information shared which receives over 50,000 visits a month. Mrs Sadler was nominated for the award by one of the users of the website, who lives in Dorset.
Colonel Bolitho told Mrs Sadler and her assembled family at the presentation that a “tremendous” amount of nominations were submitted each year and to successfully pass through the process was “quite extraordinary.”
