Chiropractic Care For Chronic Pain
Chronic Pain
Because chronic pain is not well understood by the medical field or the general public, it can sometimes be the hardest part to deal with. It can be isolating and socially embarassing for people. People can appear quite well and still have several chronic pain issues. Studies show that about 20 to 30 per cent of the population lives with chronic pain and some of those people never get help.
What Is Chronic Pain?
While acute pain is a normal sensation triggered in the nervous system to alert you to possible injury and the need to take care of yourself, chronic pain is different. Chronic pain persists despite the fact that an injury has healed. Pain signals keep firing in the nervous system for weeks, months, even years. Physical effects include tense muscles, limited mobility, a lack of energy, and changes in appetite. Emotional effects include depression, anger, anxiety, and fear of re-injury. Such a fear may hinder a person’s ability to return to normal work or leisure activities. Common chronic pain complaints include:
- Headache
- Low back pain
- Cancer pain
- Arthritis pain
- Neurogenic pain (pain resulting from damage to nerves)
- Psychogenic pain (pain not due to past disease or injury or any visible sign of damage inside)
Chronic pain may have originated with an initial trauma/injury or infection, or there may be an ongoing cause of pain. However, some people suffer chronic pain in the absence of any past injury or evidence of body damage.
What Is Acute Pain?
Chronic vs. Acute Pain
Acute pain begins suddenly and is usually sharp in quality. It serves as a warning of disease or a threat to the body. Acute pain may be caused by many events or circumstances, including:
- Surgery
- Broken bones
- Dental work
- Burns or cuts
- Labor and childbirth
- Touching a hot stove
- Smashing a finger with a hammer
Acute pain may be mild and last just a moment, or it may be severe and last for weeks or months. In most cases, acute pain does not last longer than six months and it disappears when the underlying cause of pain has been treated or has healed. Unrelieved acute pain, however, may lead to chronic pain.
Who Does Chronic Pain Affect?
Untreated pain has considerable impact on the pain sufferer and their family. Chronic pain affects people of all ages, races, and occupations. Severe chronic pain is a devastating health problem that affects as many as one in ten Americans (more than 25 million people).
Chronic pain disables more people than cancer or heart disease. It costs the U.S. economy more than $90 billion per year in medical costs, disability payments, and productivity. Yet it has received little attention from medical researchers until recently and is one of the most under funded major health problems in the United States.
For every person in search of relief from chronic pain, others are inevitably affected: husbands and wives, parents and children, friends, employers and co-workers. Chronic pain can interfere with every aspect of a person’s life: work, relationships, self-esteem, and emotional well-being.
Chronic pain brings a burden of depression, anxiety, frustration, fatigue, isolation, and lowered self-esteem. Pain makes it hard to work, hard to play, hard to get support from others, and hard to live a happy life. Chronic pain shatters productive lives.
Is There Any Treatment?
Because pain is a complex puzzle, no single health care profession holds the puzzle piece that solves this puzzle; rather, each health care profession holds a critical piece that contributes to the completion of the puzzle. Pain practitioners are trained to see their patients as multifaceted, whole systems requiring a multidisciplinary viewpoint. A vast panoply of therapeutic options are available to pain patients, ranging from allopathic medicine to various complementary disciplines.
Today’s pain patients may select Western medicine, Chinese medicine, acupuncture, pharmaceuticals, chiropractic, nutrition, supplementation, body work, yoga and psychology, to name a few. What does this mean to the pain patient? The path to pain reduction lies in the power of applying many different healing therapies in a way that complements the patient’s needs, beliefs and personality. While each of these therapies offers healing, the patient remains the key component to pain reduction. Pain patients must believe and affirm that they can reduce their pain and then select those therapies that will assist in doing so.
There are many ways to treat chronic pain that don’t include potentially addictive medication. Massage, chiropractic and acupuncture just to name a few. There are also behavioral therapies to help people cope with the pain.
Pain is the most common reason why people come to the chiropractor. Whether it’s intense throbbing from a migraine or constantly aching joints from arthritis, we all want the pain to go away — and fast! Sometimes pain is a temporary condition that will go away on its own (like after a minor injury or after surgery). But sometimes the pain is a symptom of something worse that will not get better until it is treated. It is important that you have it diagnosed as soon as possible. A chiropractor will advise you on available treatment options for pain management so you can decide what is best for you. Psychotherapy, relaxation and medication therapies, biofeedback, and behavior modification may also be employed to treat chronic pain.
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