The Acute Pain Model

What do we know about the acute pain process? Well it turns out we know a lot and this is important.

Stick with these ideas as they will come into focus when we start talking about the altogether more complex and difficult matter of chronic pain.

Understanding this will help dispel some of the confusion which surrounds pain problems.

In the Acute Pain Model:

  1. We know how the injury occurred, whether we bent over and got low back pain, fell over and got knee pain from a sprained ligament or burnt ourselves on the cooker.
  2. We know when the injury occurred, it was a clearly the result of something that happened to us.
  3. We know what has happened, what in general has been injured and how badly.
  4. We know how to treat it, from a plaster to ice to painkillers to going to the hospital. We have a pretty good idea of what to do with it.
  5. We know, more or less, how long the injury will take to get better.
  6. We know that in the end we are very likely to be able to go back to normally using the part.

All this means that any questions we might ask ourselves about our pain are easily answered, something which is definitely not the case with chronic pain syndromes.

HURT EQUALS HARM in the acute pain model, so if it is painful it is due to tissue damage. This means it is a USEFUL PAIN as it tells us what to do to protect our injury so we can heal.

Ideally all pain episodes go through the process described above but in some cases the pain does not settle for a number of poorly understood reasons and a chronic pain results.

However in acute pain the damage and pain link is strong. Acute pain protects us and without it none of us are likely to have survived to be adults.

Check out the second instalment of the Pain Ecourse.