Chronic Pain is awful

Chronic Pain is awful.

To have a diagnosis of Chronic Pain, you need to be in significant pain for most of the day, for most of the days of the week. To define significant pain, we include “I move differently, and or avoid doing some things so that I don’t hurt” when those are activities that most people would consider a normal non-painful thing to do. we include this aspect as some people don’t receive the feeling of “pain” in an “ouch” way or are able to explain how much it hurts.

Chronic Pain can feel like all sorts of things. Pain can be:

  • dull, ache, gnawing, cramping and heavy
  • sharp, hot, burning, shooting, stabbing, searing, and or cold
  • itchy
  • shallow, or deep
  • repetitive, randomly acute, or persistent and unending
Stoic man crying showing pain

Pain has some interesting biological mechanisms that give us an advantage to healing when we are hurt, but those advantages only really help us if the source of the pain can be healed. When pain persists, becoming chronic, those biological mechanisms can cause us harm.

This can create a biological feedback loop that can cause psychological trauma and biological depletion. Ongoing pain needs to be managed to avoid it becoming chronic, as chronic pain can be come chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia.

Ideally, we want to heal from harm and no longer experience the pain that harm brought us. If we can’t do that, we need do what we can do reduce pain. A good pain management plan is a combination of exercise, medication and mental health therapy.

For more information, take a look at our Chronic Pain Neurology page.