Is Pain Good? Pain Treatment Guidelines
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Many people who visit me are seeking relief from pain of one kind or another. Back pain, neck pain, spine pain, nerve pain – the list is painf… quite long. In some cases, these good people are suffering from more than one type of pain. Posture correction often plays a part in a patient’s treatment, but let’s take a look at the subject of pain itself.
Pain: What IS It, Really?
First of all, just what IS pain?
“Everyone knows that,” you say. Ouch! Fair enough, but what about the medical, scientific view of pain?
Here’s a definition from one distinguished medical dictionary* –
Pain: a feeling of distress, suffering, or agony, caused by stimulation of specialized nerve endings. Its purpose is chiefly protective; it acts as a warning that tissues are being damaged and induces the sufferer to remove or withdraw from the source.
Interestingly, the word pain itself comes from the Latin word, poena, meaning punishment.
Pain can be broken down into types, too. Here are a few of the major ones:
Acute pain: Pain in response to injury or another stimulus that resolves when the injury heals or the stimulus is removed.
Chronic pain: Pain that lasts beyond the term of an injury or painful stimulus. Can also refer to cancer pain, pain from a chronic or degenerative disease, and pain from an unidentified cause.
Referred pain: Pain felt at a site different from the location of the injured or diseased part of the body. Referred pain is due to the fact that nerve signals from several areas of the body may “feed” the same nerve pathway leading to the spinal cord and brain.**
There are even further types and finer breakdowns. It’s a broad subject.
Pain Treatments
All right – now that we know a little more about pain itself, let’s turn to the big point of interest: pain relief.
Pain medications have become pain management “tool of choice” for literally millions of people today. The most commonly used pain relievers are the over-the-counter (or “OTC”) varieties. These act on the body in various ways, giving at least temporary relief from pain – usually by blocking or interfering with the body’s mechanisms for perceiving pain or transmitting pain signals to the brain.
Going back to what pain is – a warning that body damage is occurring or has occurred – you can see that pain killers are essentially shutting off the body’s natural alarm system. They mask the true problem, rather than solving it. You might feel better for the moment, but is this really a good idea?
As a comparison, what if the fire alarm went off in your home in the middle of the night? Would it be a good idea to clamber out of bed, shut the noisy thing off and head back for some more sleep? No. You might well end up having a far, far longer snooze than you intended!
Obviously, the sensible answer to that screeching fire alarm is to find the fire and put it out.
Similarly, the safer and more sensible answer to pain is to discover what’s causing it, and treat the cause. If you don’t do so, the problem at the root of your pain may very likely worsen, resulting in a far more grave situation than a temporary discomfort. (By the way, my choice of the word “grave” here was deliberate.)
Pain Treatments – Side Effects
Quite aside from our earlier fire alarm exercise in logic, there is the matter of side effects.
Pain medications can do much more than just inhibit pain. Some of the things they may do are much worse than the pain they were taken to remedy. So if you choose to take pain killers at all, caution is an absolute must. Especially if the pain reoccurs, and you “treat” it again and again with pain killers, possibly in increasing amounts.
Patients often say “I had to take pain killers last night.” Not to seem harsh or scolding, but may I say that rather than “had to,” a more correct statement would be that they chose to take pain killers. After all, the cause of the ache or pain wasn’t a bodily shortage of ibuprofen or aspirin.
Pain Tolerance – How Much Can You Take?
Now let’s take a look at the matter of pain tolerance.
You’ve probably encountered the stoic sort who really has to be hurting before he or she would even think to mention it.
At the other end of the spectrum, there’s the person who’ll whinge at the slightest twinge.
Is this difference in pain tolerance “all in the head,” or is there really some physiological difference to account for it? Many fascinating studies have been done on the subject. In brief, evidence shows that pain tolerance is influenced by a number of different factors – physiological, mental and emotional. Depression, amount and frequency of exercise, smoking, obesity, genetics, past injuries, diseases, even such surprising factors as right- or left-handedness and hair color, all seem to play a part.
A theory I’ve developed through my years of study and practice is that as we use more and more pain medication, our “pain scales” are reset so that the brain says “Ouch!” with less input. If at first it took a hammer to produce an ouch, now it takes only a feather.
So whatever their tolerance, many turn to OTC pain medications. The drugs may ease the suffering for the moment. Well, cheers for that. But the pain was there for a reason: to sound the alarm that something is amiss. So by taking such medicines, one is suppressing the body’s natural warning signal. It’s like shutting off the fire alarm because it’s irritating, and it can have similar long-term results
Pain Treatment Guidelines
Before we go further, let me emphasize that if you’re being treated for pain by a medical professional who has prescribed pain relievers, do what your doc says. You may be interested in trying something – exercises, adjustments, etc. – in addition to what your doctor has advised. That may be fine, but please do not do so without consulting your medical professional first.
Quite aside from pain relief medications, there are many other approaches to dealing with pain. They include acupuncture, physical therapy, massage, assistive devices (such as canes, splints, and ergonomically designed chairs) biofeedback and hypnosis.
Of course, two approaches I recommend quite highly are (surprise!) chiropractic and posture correction treatment.
Pain Treatment – The Posture Correction Connection
I’ve had some remarkable successes with back pain treatment exercises and other practices and procedures, all to help patients deal with pain. These many great results have been in terms of immediate relief, as well as the longer-term business of rooting out and remedying the source of their discomforts. Here are a few videos I’ve put together for you, in this very area. I hope you enjoy and benefit from them:
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There, now – making your way through all that didn’t hurt a bit, did it?
Now I’d like very much to know your thoughts and experiences.
What is your experience of pain? Do you or don’t you with pain killers? Do you think you have a high or low pain tolerance?
Come on now – it doesn’t hurt to share! You can write to me down below. Or, Twitter being quite the thing these days, you’re more than welcome to tweet about it. Either way, I look forward to hearing from you.
* Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health, Seventh Edition. © 2003 by Saunders, an imprint of Elsevier, Inc. All rights reserved.
** Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine. © 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
