Everyone experiences occasional aches and pains. In fact, sudden pain is an important reaction of the nervous system that helps alert you to possible injury. When an injury occurs, pain signals travel from the injured area up your spinal cord and to your brain.
Pain will usually become less severe as the injury heals. However, chronic pain is different from typical pain. With chronic pain, your body continues to send pain signals to your brain, even after an injury heals. This can last several weeks to years. Chronic pain can limit your mobility and reduce your flexibility, strength, and endurance. This may make it challenging to get through daily tasks and activities.
Chronic pain is defined as pain that lasts at least 12 weeks. The pain may feel sharp or dull, causing a burning or aching sensation in the affected areas. It may be steady or intermittent, coming and going without any apparent reason. Chronic pain can occur in nearly any part of your body. The pain can feel different in the various affected areas.
Some of the most common types of chronic pain include:
- headache
- postsurgical pain
- post-trauma pain
- lower back pain
- cancer pain
- arthritis pain
- neurogenic pain (pain caused by nerve damage)
- psychogenic pain (pain that isn’t caused by disease, injury, or nerve damage)
According to the American Academy of Pain Medicine, more than 1.5 billion people around the world have chronic pain. It’s the most common cause of long-term disability in the United States, affecting about 100 million Americans.
Chronic pain is usually caused by an initial injury, such as a back sprain or pulled muscle. It’s believed that chronic pain develops after nerves become damaged. The nerve damage makes pain more intense and long lasting. In these cases, treating the underlying injury may not resolve the chronic pain.
In some cases, however, people experience chronic pain without any prior injury. The exact causes of chronic pain without injury aren’t well understood. The pain may sometimes result from an underlying health condition, such as:
- chronic fatigue syndrome: characterized by extreme, prolonged weariness that’s often accompanied by pain
- endometriosis: a painful disorder that occurs when the uterine lining grows outside of the uterus
- fibromyalgia: widespread pain in the bones and muscles
- inflammatory bowel disease: a group of conditions that causes painful, chronic inflammation in the digestive tract
- interstitial cystitis: a chronic disorder marked by bladder pressure and pain
- temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMJ): a condition that causes painful clicking, popping, or locking of the jaw
- vulvodynia: chronic vulva pain that occurs with no obvious cause
Is There a Fast Way to Treat Chronic Pain ?
These are comments often heard from clients when it comes to their bodies and how they deal with pain, tension, and discomfort. Understandably so, the discomfort and malaise of chronic pain issues feel like a nuisance and, in exasperation, clients want their issues resolved NOW and QUICKLY. I am grateful to have the privilege to change their mentality on the ‘quick-fix’ solution.
Culturally, we live in a fast-pacedworld that feeds and indulges our immediate gratification on a daily basis. We have instant information at our fingertips via the Internet, buy food at restaurants and groceries at supermarkets within walking or driving distance from our homes, connect with friends and family instantaneously with our cellphones no matter where you are, and multitudes of medications to immediately solve any medical problem out there.
A broken leg, and the acute pain it causes, can often be treated relatively quickly, says Perry Fine, MD, a pain specialist at the University of Utah. But chronic pain is more akin to bigger problems like diabetes or advanced cancer, which can’t be so quickly or easily “fixed.”
The goal when treating chronic pain isn’t necessarily to become pain-free. Instead, the target is often a good quality of life while managing pain at a tolerable level.
“What’s important is for people in chronic pain to communicate … with their doctor, and let them know what their pain level is that keeps them from doing certain things,” Fine says. “For example, ‘My pain is keeping me from sleeping, going to work, and getting around and walking.’ Then talk to the practitioner about establishing specific, measurable goals such as being able to vacuum, go to work, have sex, and get to sleep.”
To reach these goals, doctors may try:
- Medication that address pain from different angles. For example, antidepressantscan help “calm down” the nervous system and make it less sensitive to the pain, Fine says. The anti-seizure drugs gabapentin and pregabalin can also be effective for certain types of nerve pain.
- Injecting anesthetic or steroids into injured areas.
- Doing surgery to treat the source of pain. This includes joint replacements, repairing damaged discs in the spine, or taking pressure off a pinched nerve.
Your doctor may also suggest that you work with a physical or occupational therapist. You may also want to seek answers to the mental components of pain rather than just the physical side, Fine says.
Pain is the TOP Cause of Disability in U.S.
The following Statistics pertain to the Prescription Pain Pill epidemic:
• More Americans now die from drug overdoses than in car accidents, according to a new government report released last December. http://health.usnews.com/health-news/managing-your-healthcare/articles/2011/12/20/drug-overdoses-kill-more-americans-than-car-accidents-cdc
• Abuse of the drugs has been tied to overdose deaths, burglary of pharmacies and increased crime nationally.
• Prescription drugs are the second-most abused category of drugs in the United States, following marijuana. http://www.painmed.org/patientcenter/facts_on_pain.aspx
Pain Medications, Pain Relief, and Pain Management
