Help for People Who May be Suffering from Chronic Pain

Physical pain can be useful in that it helps us avoid danger, recover when we’re injured, and stop pushing ourselves beyond what we can endure. For many people, pain is a temporary thing with a known cause. But for many others, pain may persist, even long after an injury has healed. Other people may experience pain–even severe pain–with no obvious cause. What happens when the pain that is supposed to help us starts to take over and destroy our lives?

When physicians discuss pain, they often divide it into two groups, “acute pain” and “chronic pain.” Acute pain is pain of short duration that has a known or at least probable cause. If you have ever sprained your ankle, you know what acute pain is. Acute pain can occur after oral surgery, getting a papercut, burning your fingers, or getting stung by a bee. Acute pain is typically most severe right after the injury and gradually diminishes.

How long acute pain lasts depends on a lot of things, including what caused it and your general health, but as a rule of thumb most physicians would say acute pain should diminish in a matter of days or weeks. A rule of thumb is that acute pain should not last more than two months.

Chronic pain has several definitions. It has been defined in the medical literature as pain that lasts for two months or longer. More and more, researchers are starting to recognize that chronic pain is more than just long-lasting pain; it can be quite different physiologically from acute pain. In fact, this type of persistent pain may be fundamentally different than acute pain.

In some cases, chronic pain is pain from a condition that won’t go away. If you have osteoarthritis and it affects the discs or shock absorbers between the vertebrae of your spinal column, you will likely have persistent pain because the condition that causes it–the arthritis–cannot be reversed. Cancer can cause persistent pain as can any number of other diseases.

In other cases, chronic pain has no obvious cause. Sometimes an injury to one part of the body will seem to heal but the pain persists. This can occur when an injury to a hand seems to get better medically but the painful condition not only persists, it actually gets worse over time.

Chronic pain can also occur when no cause is even apparent. Many years ago, people with fibromyalgia were thought to be hypochondriacs because they felt pain, sometimes quite severe pain, but there was nothing obvious in their examination that could cause such pain. Today, we know that fibromyalgia involves a kind of nerve or neuropathic pain. Neuropathic pain can be hard to diagnose because nerves do not show up on X-rays or other imaging techniques.

For many people with chronic pain, the pain is constant, but other people report pain that can come and go or vary in intensity. Many people with chronic pain report “good days” and “bad days,” although it is often hard for them to predict just what contributes to making some days more or less painful.

Headache sufferers can have chronic pain even if they do not have a perpetual headache. Headache sufferers often count as chronic pain patients even if they have many days between headaches with no pain at all.

While medical science has not formulated an exact definition yet for chronic pain and there is no simple lab test to determine who has it and who does not, it can be important to discuss pain–chronic or otherwise–with your physician.

You may have chronic pain if you have pain frequently or all of the time, even if the pain is not always severe. Another way to determine if you have chronic pain is to assess whether your painful episodes stop you from going about the normal activities of your life, such as going to work or school or taking care of your home. You do not have to know what causes the pain to have chronic pain. Nor does the pain need to be overwhelming and debilitating to merit treatment.

There are many ways to help manage chronic pain and this therapy does not necessarily involve major drugs–in fact, it may not even involve drugs at all. In fact, there are many lifestyle modifications and other things tha can be done to reduce, if not eliminate, chronic pain.

If you think you might have chronic pain or if pain is interfering with your life (even occasionally), talk to your physician. If your physician is not able to help you, ask for a referral to a pain specialist.

Chronic pain can be treated, but many people fail to get the advice and tools to help manage their pain and wind up suffering needlessly. The first step may be asking for help.

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