What is Pain? Types, Causes and Treatment for Acute and Chronic Pain.
Pain is a complex topic that can be difficult to quantify. Put simply, pain is our body’s way of communicating potential or actual harm through uncomfortable sensations in our bodies that range from annoying to debilitating. When we feel pain, a signal is sent through nerves in our bodies known as nociceptors', which transmit information along our spinal cord through to our brain for interpretation.
Pain is a highly subjective experience and unique for each person, which makes pain challenging to define and treat. Pain may be sudden and short lived, or ongoing and constant or intermittent. It may be localised, only affecting specific body parts, or generalised through overall body aches such as those experienced when suffering from the flu.
Finding a way to describe and understand our pain is an important first step in finding appropriate strategies to effectively manage it.
Why do we experience pain?
Our bodies are covered in millions of sensors which detect stimuli such as pressure, temperature and chemicals. When our sensors are stimulated, they send information to our spinal cord, and if powerful enough, to our brain. Our central nervous system determines the validity of potential threats and when necessary, produces a pain output which prompts us to take action to alleviate pain.
Our reflexes will naturally try to alleviate pain. For example, if you were to bump into a wall, you may naturally react by rubbing the affected area to attempt to stimulate another sensation that distracts you from the negative stimulus.
Pain does not always equally correlate with the level of harm. For example, a papercut can be a rather unpleasant experience despite minimal injury actually occurring in your tissues. The efficiency of communication between our nerve fibres and brain will dictate how each person experiences pain.
What are the different types of pain?
Pain is a unique experience for everyone, varying in intensity and quality. There are two main categories of pain, acute and chronic.
Acute Pain
Acute pain can usually be attributed to something specific such as a cut, broken bone, burn or illness. This pain can often be sharp and resolves as the affected area heals and recovers. Acute pain usually goes away within days, weeks or months of treating the underlying source of pain.
Chronic or Persistent Pain
Chronic pain affects 3.4million Australians. Chronic or persistent pain is pain that is ongoing after typical healing time frames. The nervous system can become overprotective, which means we can experience pain despite our injury being healed and our tissues being safe. Our lifestyle factors and behaviours have a big influence on our pain experiences. Over time and with individualised strategies, the pain system can learn to become less protective again.
Diagnosing and Measuring Pain
As each individual’s experience of pain is highly subjective, health practitioners must use qualitative assessments to assess, measure and diagnose pain. Some questions health practitioners may ask to help identify pain include:
How would you describe the nature of your pain? i.e. does it feel like a burning, stinging or stabbing sensation?
Is the pain sharp or dull?
Where is the pain, how does it feel and how far does it spread?
What aggravates and relieves the pain?
Is the pain constant or intermittent? Does it occur at different times throughout the day?
How does the pain affect your daily activities and mood?
A common method for attempting to measure pain is via numerical ranking between 0 and 10, where 0 indicates no pain at all and 10 represents the worst pain imaginable. The subjective nature of individual ranking means one person’s “6/10” will not be equal to another person’s ranking, and thus, health practitioners keep a record of an individual’s pain rankings in order to compare individuals to previous self-assessments.
How can I manage my pain?
When recovering from an injury, we can expect our pain to reduce as healing progresses. However, sometimes pain can persist after your tissues have healed. This is because our nervous system can become reliant on patterns and memory. It is important to understand that when something hurts, it does not always mean harm or further injury.
There are many contributors to our pain experiences and each person’s pain is unique. There is no ‘one size fits all approach’ and management strategies may target exercise and physical activity, sleep, general health, emotions and our thought patterns.
How can Physiotherapy and Exercise Physiology help me manage my pain?
A Physiotherapist and Exercise Physiologist can help you understand your pain and answer any questions you may have. Using your goals as the basis of your treatment, we will work collaboratively to develop active and positive strategies to help reduce and manage your pain. This may involve movement and exercise, breathing exercises, and graded exposure techniques.
Got pain? Book in for an assessment now to start working towards managing and overcoming it.