Managing Your Pain instead of Pain Managing you

12/3/2004

Managing Chronic Pain                                                                                                                                        Pain is defined in many different ways. For a patient it may be no more than an intermittent nagging concern that corrects itself without treatment; or it may be the most unpleasant experience in life that encompasses and defines every physical activity. The problem may be short lived i.e. "Acute" or more prolonged i.e. "Chronic". It is chronic pain that both patients and many clinicians face difficulty acknowledging and treating. Pain comes from many sources. It is well accepted that pain may arise secondary to influences in the environment that through processing and modulation, in both the brain and spinal cord, reach the level of consciousness. Equally real is the perception of pain in the absence of damaging influences, either through memory maps of previous stimuli or through involuntary muscle contraction leading to tension headaches, facial, or chest wall pain. Thus the level of pain and associated behavior may not correlate with physical findings, leading to the impression that the pain was less real than pain from an identifiable cause. Understanding pain requires a knowledge of the relationships among painful stimuli, suffering and behavior. Pain may be experienced without apparent stimuli or nerve damage. In either case it needs to be attended to and treated. Treating pain as a disorder or disease rather than simply a signal of tissue damage allows the true benefit of pain management to come to light. One of the hardest problems faced by many with chronic pain is realizing that there are treatments available and that concerned physicians in the community are ready to help. By accepting pain as a disease and taking the initiative directly or through the use of ones family physician it is my hope that more people will learn to take advantage of the resources available to them for the treatment and management of many chronic pain conditions.  
clevelandclinic.org/painmanagement  
 
 

Producer and Host: Lori Schmitt R.N.

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