Pain and Chronic Pain
“Almost 21% of the U.S. population - 51.6 million adults - lives with chronic pain, defined as pain lasting more than three months. Of those, 17.1 million live with high-impact chronic pain that substantially restricts their ability to work or participate in daily activities.” - U.S. Pain Foundation [based on the CDC’s National Health Interview Survey]
What is pain exactly?
According to the International Association for the Study of Pain: pain is “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage.”
In laymen terms = pain is your body’s warning system that something isn’t quite right.
Pain can be felt as burning, stabbing, aching, pulsing, and as other sensations, it can range from mild to severe, from on-and-off to continuous, and from simply distracting to completely disabling.
There are different types of pain signals from the body:
nociceptive pain (nerve endings that send signals to the nervous system from the skin’s surface of threat or damage);
neuropathic pain (caused by dysfunction or damage to the nerve itself);
and nociplastic pain (pain signals coming from the nerve endings even though there is no evidence of actual threat or damage).
Not all pain falls neatly into a category though, and more often it’s a combination of various pain types.
There is no true pain measuring system, the only way to measure the levels of pain is by personal experience. Every individual’s pain threshold, the point at which you sense pain, and pain tolerance levels are unique. So how I experience pain isn’t that same as how you experience pain.
Acute pain is the immediate sense of an injury, lasting through the healing process. Chronic pain is pain that outlasts the normal healing time or after the danger stimulus to the nerve is gone. This is pain that may no longer signal damage.
When acute pain moves into chronic pain, it can become the disease itself, evolving and changing. Over time, the body will create compensation patterns to avoid pain and will create changes in the nervous system.
Our understanding of chronic pain is evolving, Cindy Steinberg, National Director of Policy and Advocacy for the U.S. Pain Foundation explains, “improved neuroscience has shown us that chronic pain is a disease itself of the nervous system and brain, so regardless of the original etiology [source] of the pain, chronic pain becomes the disease or becomes a co-morbid disease”.
As an example, a person with diabetes develops neuropathy [nerve dysfunction] from the diabetes, the chronic pain then resulting from the neuropathy becomes the secondary disease. Some physicians without understanding this correlation of chronic pain as the disease will ignore the pain and continue to search for ‘the disease or source causing the pain’.
It can be challenging for someone living with chronic pain to describe and/or pinpoint their pain, which makes it difficult when working with health care providers to find the source and determine a treatment. Because chronic pain is so unique, there isn’t a clear-cut source and treatment. And for some it can lead to a frustrating road of medical professionals trying various treatments and medications without relief.
Unfortunately, for too long, the first (and often only) option considered for pain management was prescribing medications. This has led us to our current opioid addiction crisis. Even though we are still working through this, health care providers are turning to alternative options for managing pain, such as massage therapy.
The good news is that significant evidence supports including regular massage therapy sessions into chronic pain management and treatments. Even better news is that research also indicates massage therapy can provide relief for those with conditions where pain is not localized to a specific part of the body.
More evidence that massage therapy is healthcare.
Sources:
Vallet, Michelle. “Promising Approaches to Pain Relief: Learn what leading experts on pain have to say about the role of massage therapy in pain management.” August 1, 2019. American Massage Therapy Association.
Nelson, Doug. “Understanding Pain in the Body” September 2022. Presentation; American Massage Therapy Association.
US Pain Foundation. (n.d.-b). U.S. Pain Foundation - serving patients with chronic pain. U.S. Pain Foundation. Retrieved September 2023, from https://uspainfoundation.org/
International Association for the Study of Pain. (n.d.). International Association for the Study of Pain | IASP. International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP). Retrieved September 2023, from https://www.iasp-pain.org/
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