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.
• Pain is meant to protect us - telling us something is wrong. 
• All pain is real.
• Pain comes from the brain 100% of the time, not the body part where it is felt. The brain generates the pain experience.
• What your doctor or diagnostic test tells you may hurt you. Words matter. 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. No 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 become at creating it - turning up the pain volume. We can become over-sensitized to pain.
• Hurt doesn’t always mean harm.
• Just treating the pain is not enough, we need to treat the whole person and the brain.
• 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.
• Not all pain may not go completely away. Expectations need to change from being pain-free to pain management. It's important to accept it, adjust to it, and adapt to it. ​
• Pain can be modified and controlled by retraining an overprotective pain system.
• The best treatment for chronic pain is interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary care – combining different therapies.
• Once the pain becomes chronic, the goal should be pain management to increase function and quality of life, not just pain reduction or elimination. 
• 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 and change pain. You have control.
• Recovery is possible.