Acute Pain Review

I hope you found the discussion about Acute Pain and Injury useful, where we covered what acute pain is and what we know about it.

To review this quickly before we go on to chronic pain: Acute pain is the normal everyday pain we are familiar with during our childhood and adult years. It is recent in occurrence and we know what the cause is, how to manage it and that it will get completely better in the end.

In acute pain HURT EQUALS HARM and tissue damage has occurred, it is a USEFUL pain which forces us to do something to protect the part and so get better.

Chronic pain is not like an acute pain which lasts longer, it is quite different. Nothing much we know about acute pain helps us much with understanding the complex nature of chronic pain. The confusion about chronic pain syndromes such as low back pain, neck pain, neuropathic pain, complex regional pain syndrome and many others leads to a lot of distress and conflict.

Chronic Pain

We went through a process with the idea of acute pain and I am going to do the same again with the ideas which underlie the Chronic Pain Model:

  • Chronic pain is long term and does not describe the severity or importance of the pain. The pain has remained longer than the expected healing time for the injury or event which triggered it.
  • What message is chronic pain sending us? The acute pain message is “Warning, you have damaged yourself” and chronic pain can feel that way. However the message from many chronic pain problems is UNCLEAR.
  • We change our behaviour in response to acute pain, do we do the same for chronic pain? Oh yes, we try and take the required measures to alleviate or relieve our pain.
  • On taking action about the pain, the problem does not heal up and go away and the pain stays, sometimes from that time onwards. Why it does so is something for a later part of the course.
  • If there is no injury present then there can be no healing as you have to have an injury to heal. No-one ever says “I had a bad headache yesterday but it healed up”, so some pains are not related to injury anyhow.
  • With time the person with the chronic pain tries lots of different pain treatments, goes to the physiotherapist, has acupuncture, but the pain does not reduce and they don’t go back to normal.

Continue with Part Two of the Pain Ecourse – Chronic Pain.