PAIN Acute Vs Chronic

Part One:

By Dean Montague (BSc, MCSP), Musculoskeletal Physiotherapist

When I am treating in the clinic I am often really amazed by how much pain people normalise and have learned to live with. Of course, when pain reaches the point where someone cannot live with it anymore, they come to our clinic! But this process can sometimes take weeks, months or even years!

It’s testament to the sheer strength of human capability that we can live with pain for years. It also highlights an important aspect in the understanding of pain.

Pain is not just physical.

The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) defines pain as:

“An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage.”

I got sick of seeing that statement while I was undertaking research for my dissertation, it’s vague compared to the complexity of pain and doesn't do it justice! In reality, pain has social and psychological aspects to it.

Want proof?

I want you to go and push a toddler over recall a time when a toddler fell over by accident and how their loved ones reacted. Did they trivialise, allowing the toddler to brush it off and get on with being annoying?

Or did they shower their precious with sympathy and pity, all the while admonishing them for being silly?

The pain, at least the physical stimuli of the kid scraping their knee is thew same but the way the parent reacts affects how the baby feels that pain!

The way we are taught to experience pain has significant impact on our… experience of pain! One exception being if you get your arm chopped off, or get hit by a car, or get a papercut! There’s no trivialising that, it just hurts!

Now if you’re currently feeling pain, you’re probably one more sentence away from checking out mentally, but bear with me because this is the start of your journey into understanding your pain, so that you can control it.

I’m going to break pain down into different duration-types:

Acute - happens quickly, think trauma but also muscle strains, or ligament sprains, that sort of thing.

Chronic - This is pain that has been going on for some time (3+ months) and something not always the direct result of a traumatic event but may be associated with it.

This is your first step to understanding your pain, and managing it. Is it acute or is it chronic?

Now if you have gone and fallen over drunk and broken or sprained an ankle then you know it’s acute pain right?

But what if you did that 2 years ago and… and

You have never been the same since.

It’s gone and set your hip off!

You can’t run now.

Ahem… sorry.

So yeah, sometimes even sorting acute from chronic can be complicated, as can sorting out whether your back pain is associated with that pesky ankle sprain you got at the Sam Fender concert last year!

At the Body Repair Clinic when we assess someone, we want ALL your history. What, when, where, how… why? (Sometimes).

We do this so that we can start the process of sorting out chronic and acute pain, because just maybe that ankle sprain is the reason your back hurts, or you hip, your foot or even just your whole body!

Pain is very complicated and more than just that physical stimuli that makes you scream (or swear if you need to feel manly).

In the next few blog episodes (yes this is episode one) I will teach you about the different types of pain and how you can manage it.

In the meantime, why not book yourself an assessment here at the clinic and take the first step towards understanding, managing and ultimately, eliminating or at least minimising your pain?

To be continued…

Disclaimer: this article was not written by AI! It came straight from my head.