Chronic Pain

What We Have Learned About Managing Chronic Pain

American Chronic Pain Association

In 30 years of helping each other, we’ve learned a lot. Here is a bit of that wisdom:

We need the support of others who experience and understand chronic pain.
Recognizing emotions helps us to understand ourselves.
While our pain is certainly not all in our heads, attitudes and expectations do make a difference.
Learning how to relax is essential. It helps prevent tension and redirects our attention on to other things we have some control over.
Staying active, within realistic limits, can help us remain flexible and strong and reduce our sense of suffering.
It is important to set realistic goals and chart our progress toward them.
Chronic pain not only involves the person with pain, but the family as well.
Hearing others talk of similar feelings and experiences caused by pain reduces our isolation.
There are no wrong feelings.
Half the battle is won when you begin to help yourself.

What is Chronic Pain? Ed Covington, M.D.:

Most pain is temporary and manageable, but chronic pain is different. And because it is

different, we need to think about it in very different ways.

In the overwhelming majority of cases acute pain can be linked to some specific

occurrence; there’s an inflamed appendix, there’s an inflamed joint, there’s a broken bone. With

chronic pain there may be no apparent physical injury or illness to explain it. The physician and the

patient are accustomed to deal with acute pain and both naturally expect that some cause will be found,

and when it’s found, it can be fixed and at that point the pain will go away. Part of the problem with

chronic pain is that when we start looking for an explanation it’s not so much that we’re looking in the

wrong place, but we may be looking in the wrong time. And what I mean by that is that the presence of

a severe pain problem which exists for some period of time can actually change the nervous system so

that the peripheral nerves are changed, after a period of time the spinal cord has changed, after a

period of time there are even changes in various levels of the brain. So that to explain a person’s pain

one day it may be necessary to look at an illness that actually went away several years earlier.

We don’t know everything that there is to know about chronic pain, but here’s what we do know:

 Chronic Pain is any pain that continues beyond the expected period of healing for an illness or

injury.

 You can experience pain even if you are no longer ill or if your injuries have healed.

 In fact, many persons experience pain even in the absence of an apparent cause.

 But chronic pain has a physiological or neurological basis even when we don’t know what it is.

 Chronic pain is real.