Understanding Pain

Understanding Pain

By Karen Benford Smith

Pain can be the most debilitating trauma to the body.  The dictionary defines the word pain as localized physical suffering associated with a bodily disorder as a disease or injury.  Problems arising in the body are often misdiagnosed because the individual is unfamiliar with the different types of pain classification.  Pain is determined by the kind of impairment that is produced. Physician’s group pain by tissue damage (nociceptive pain) and nerve damage (neuropathic pain). An additional type of pain is psychogenic pain commonly brought on by fear, depression, stress, or anxiety.

Further classification of pain can relate to the area that is aching such as back pain or chest pain.

Acute pain is often caused by damage to the tissues. Body tissues that sustain tissue damage as the result of a cut or broken bone.  Cancer is another way acute pain can be felt in the body.

When an athlete suffers a sports injury such as a twisted ankle or Achilles tendonitis, acute pain is the result outcome.  Application of the Rest, Ice, Compress, and Elevate is often advised to relieve the acute pain caused by injury.  Achilles tendonitis may be the result of overuse, wrong tennis shoes, over pronation, increasing the running distance, or wear and tear on the tendons.  In any case pain can be unbearable, which leads to intensified anguish from the thinking about the pain, and the outcome is psychological pain.

Chronic pain is a continuous pain that does not comply with medical treatment. This type of pain often occurs with breakthrough pain... Breakthrough pain is pain that continues even if medication is being used for the treatment, causing episodes of relief but soon after the pain returns.  Amazingly 70% of chronic pain patients have breakthrough pain. Often the explanation is the medication was not taking in accordance with the label on the bottle, as the patient forgot to continue the dosage to make the medication effective. 

Everyone tolerates pain differently.  What may be tolerable to this individual may be excruciating pain to the next.  Understanding the classification of pain may encourage individuals to seek massage for their affliction. The body is an amazing tool that takes time and self-care to relieve an injury.  Thirteen weeks for a chronic injury is the amount of time that the body heals itself. If the body does not repair itself in 13 weeks then the individual should seek medical advice. 

Often a change in diet or starting a stretching regime can encourage pain to leave the body.  Managing pain is a slow and patient process, something that is hard for individuals to comprehend.  Eating properly, drinking plenty of water, and placing 3 cups Epsom salts in a bath and soaking is often the minimal requirements to reduce pain.

(Pain Management Health Center, 2013)

Pain Management Health Center. (2013, June 25). Retrieved from Web MD: www.webmd.com/pain-management/guide/pain-types-and calssifications