Chronic Pain issues : How can we Define it

Understanding Chronic pain

Pain is a very personal? private experience. 

• You may believe that no one knows or understands how you feel. 
• You may be frustrated with treatments that don't help. 
• Sometimes your pain may get worse, or better for reasons you don't understand. 
• You may feel angry, afraid, or sad and wonder what your future holds.
• Chronic pain can be a lonely experience.

Yet more than 70 million Americans experience chronic pain. You are definitely not alone. 

The challenge is learning how to not only manage chronic pain but how to thrive, in spite of it. 

Many people with chronic pain have learned to live well with their pain. 

• Feeling in control 
• Pursuing goals
• Working
• And enjoying relationships

They have learned to lead rich lives, even though they have chronic pain.

How Does Pain work

The first step towards managing your pain is to understand how pain works

Let's start with sudden, acute, short-term pain, such as back pain caused by lifting something that is too heavy. 

The sudden pain

The sudden pain that you feel in your back is an experienced created by your brain, the pain experience is partly due to a signal sent from muscles in your back, up your spinal cord to your brain 

The pain signal is the body's way of telling the brain that damage has occurred where is about to occur. 

The Pain is complicated

Pain is a complicated experience here is an important fact, how much a person hurts is not necessarily related to the extent of injury, disease severity, or strength of the pain signal. 

here are five illustrations of this fact:

• A slight touch, or even a breeze, may produce severe facial pain in a condition called trigeminal neuralgia. 
• A person whose leg has been amputated may actually feel pain in the missing leg,  as if the leg had not been removed 
• The area of the body that hurts may not even be the same area that is injured 
• For many people with chronic pain, the pain persists long after the injury has healed. 
• Under conditions of stress or emergency, even a severely injured person may feel no pain until after the emergency has passed. 

These examples illustrate that the pain signal doesn't tell the whole story 

Others Factors influence pain

In both acute and chronic pain, the pain experience is only partly determined by the signal to the brain. This is especially true in chronic pain. 

In creating the sensation of pain, your brain takes other factors into account, these other factors can magnify how much pain you feel. Let's take a look at these other factors

of course the pain signal influences the pain experienced, other factors that impact pain include: 

• Your emotions 
• Your thoughts 
• Your behavior 
• other people's responses to your pain

You can change the pain experienced by changing any or all of these factors. It is important to note that medical treatments mainly influenced the pain signal, however other types of treatments can influence emotions thoughts behavior, or social responses. 

1. Your emotions :

Your emotions are powerful source of information. Strong negative emotions suggests that something is really wrong and can actually increase how much you hurt.

In acute pain, strong emotion can be useful information to your brain. enhancing the significance of the pain signal. 

In acute pain your brain creates a powerful pain experience that is a call-to-action. 

• put the heavy box down
• take your hand away from the hot stove 
• stop swinging the hammer onto your finger 

in chronic pain negative emotion is generally not useful, it no longer serves as a call to action, as it does in a acute pain worse, your brain may use your emotions to amplify the pain signal making you hurt more than you need to

   2. Your thoughts :

Your brain also takes your thoughts about pain into account. some thoughts are really self-defeating : 

• I can't stand this 
• My life is ruined 
• I'm completely miserable 
• My pain is really horrible

  3. Your behavior :

Self-defeating thoughts cause negative emotions, interfere with problem solving, may cause you to give up, and make the pain experience worse. 

Your brain also takes your thoughts about pain into account. some thoughts are really self-defeating : 

• I can't stand this 
• My life is ruined 
• I'm completely miserable 
• My pain is really horrible

  4. Other people's responses to your pain:

The way family and friends respond to your pain, also impact the pain experienced created by your brain , Even though family and friends maybe trying their best to be helpful to You, they can sometimes convey negative messages such as 

• You are a burden 
• You're unable to manage your life
• You need lots of extra help 
• You are not in control of your pain 

if other people seem to be telling you that you are weak, helpless, and sick, it can be difficult not to feel that way. 

Conclusion

To summarize your emotions and thoughts, your behavior, and the behavior of those around you are all accounted for by the brain. In chronic pain, the pain signal is only part of the story. 

But here's the good news, your emotions, your thoughts, your behavior, and how you relate to others can be controlled and changed. You can control and modify your pain experience 

with your doctor's help, you can work to change the pain signal using medical treatments with the help of the chronic pain management program you can change the other factors, the chronic pain management program will help you to feel and think better, do more, and relate better to your family and friends, not only will you learn to manage your chronic pain you will learn to thrive