Some simple truths about pain
- The better you understand pain, the better equipped you are to manage it and change it.
- Pain is an unpleasant physical and emotional biopsychosocial experience with biological, psychological, and social contributors - not just a number on the pain scale. or a physical sensation.
- Pain is meant to protect us - telling us something is wrong.
- The pain experience is determined and modulated by the brain, not the body part where it is felt.
- What your doctor or diagnostic test tells you may hurt you. Words matter.
- Sometimes, we can be in pain even when there is no actual threat to the body. Likewise, it's possible to have signs of injury but no pain. We aren't our x-ray.
- There is a difference between short-term acute pain and long-term chronic pain.
- Acute pain is the body’s normal response to tissue damage or injury. It is a symptom. The pain matches the damage and treatment works - lasting less than three months.
- Chronic pain is an abnormal response, becomes its own disease/condition, and doesn’t improve over time. It can happen long after an injury or illness heals.
- Chronic pain often has no known biomedical structural cause like tissue damage, injury, or infection. Nor does it have a biomedical cure. We can’t always be fixed with a pill, injection, or surgery.
- The longer we have pain, the less likely it is related to tissue damage or injury, and the better our bodies can learn it and create it - turning up the pain volume. We can become over-sensitized to pain.
- Hurt doesn’t always mean harm. Just because you hurt doesn’t mean there is always structural or tissue damage happening in your body.
- Just treating the pain is not enough, we need to treat the whole person.
- What we think and feel about pain, as well as how we behave, affects our pain experience.
- The more we focus on the pain, the worse the pain experience is for us.
- Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. Pain is what we feel - it happens to us. Suffering is what we do with pain - we have a choice.
- Expectations need to change from being pain-free to pain management. Expectations need to change from being pain-free to pain management. It's essential to accept, adjust, and adapt to it.
- Pain can be modified and controlled by retraining an overprotective pain system.
- The best treatment for chronic pain is interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary/multidisciplinary care – combining different therapies.
- People living with pain need to take active responsibility to self-manage the pain with support from healthcare professionals - changing from a "patient in pain" to a "person living well, despite the pain."
- Just as we can learn pain, we can unlearn pain.
- Recovery is possible. The pain experience can change, even go away.
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©2023
Chronic Pain Champions, LLC
All rights reserved.
For personal, non-commercial use.
©2023
Chronic Pain Champions, LLC
All rights reserved.
For personal, non-commercial use.