Your pain is unique. Because the perception and tolerance of pain varies widely from one individual to another, pain can be difficult to define. Only you can say where your pain is located, how it feels, and how impactful it is to your routine function.
Pain can prevent you from enjoying the simple pleasures in life, like a good night's sleep, a walk on the beach or enjoying family and friends. It is not only a physical challenge but can also affect one's mental, social, economic, and spiritual health. Persistent pain is often accompanied by depression or anxiety. Essentially, any new pain is the body's way of communicating that something may be wrong. The brain receives information from the body via pathways in the spinal cord and nerves, all of which end in thousands of tiny receptor nerve cells in and within the skin, bone and muscle sensing heat, cold, light, touch, pressure, and pain.
Following injury to our tissues, pain is an immediate, protective friend, guarding us from, and hopefully preventing, further harm or damage. But if this important warning signal does not abate despite the healing process, the persistent chronic pain often becomes a disease unto itself, promoting a gradual unrelenting decline in function, emotional and social well being and sensitizing the entire body to the ravages of future injury. This is why early aggressive care of severe pain is so important." -- Michael J. O'Connell, M.D.
Types of Pain
Typically, pain is broadly, but most usefully, classified as either acute or chronic.
Acute pain is the normal sensation immediately triggered in the nervous system upon injury, such as in sports injuries, post-operative pain, and post-trauma pain. It is of relatively short duration and, in most cases, once the injury heals the pain subsides altogether. Acute pain can begin suddenly, is often described as feeling sharp, and is frequently termed the "body's warning signal" telling us that something is wrong and requires immediate attention. Pain specialists recognize the importance of controlling acute pain in order to prevent it from becoming chronic.
Chronic pain is surprisingly very different from acute pain in that the signals sent by "long-since-healed tissues" along the nervous system keep "firing" for weeks, months, or perhaps years. This type of pain is overwhelming in its relentlessness and persistence. It can mask all other symptoms. Often, the pain can be traced back to an original injury such as a sprained back or a serious infection. In other cases, the persistent pain can have a biological cause, such as with arthritis or diabetes, originating from progressively damaged joints or nervous tissue. For our older population, age can be a factor for the development of certain chronic conditions such as back, neck and head pain associated with arthritis or cancer. It is not unusual, however, for some people to suffer with chronic pain without evidence of any past injury, or in the absence of any bodily defect. It is clear from medical literature and our own experience with patients that a distant past history of physical/sexual abuse as a child/adolescent is a very common theme in this group.
Treatments recommended for acute and chronic pain are generally quite different. In some cases, the pain specialist can stop or alleviate chronic pain with a single or series of procedures. Chronic pain can be part of a widespread complex disease process and the specific causes may be difficult to pinpoint; however, once identified, effective treatment may be aimed much more successfully at the individual components of the pain.
We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities, and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to." -- C.S. Lewis
In many chronic situations, such as with arthritis or cancer , pain specialists may provide palliative care, with the primary goal being to partially relieve the pain, soothe discomfort, improve quality of life, and restore functionality, but not necessarily effecting a total abatement of the pain.
The incurability of many chronic pain conditions presents a major challenge for the patient whose expectations can be somewhat unrealistic. Through a combination of medical, psychological and rehabilitation techniques, pain specialists enable the chronic pain patient to establish coping mechanisms which allow them to effectively manage their pain. It is when the patients learn to refocus the energy used in anger or frustration toward incremental exercise, cessation of smoking and maintaining ideal body weight that they then reap huge rewards.
