We all feel pain from time to time. When someone injures themselves, specific nerves recognise this as pain, which in turn triggers the body’s repair mechanism. As the problem resolves, the pain tends to improve and usually disappears within 3-6 months. This type of pain could be argued to be beneficial: if it hurts, you are likely to try and avoid doing whatever it is that has caused the pain in the future, so you are less likely to injure yourself in that way again.
Occasionally the pain continues even after tissue healing has finished. When pain continues after this point, it becomes known as persistent (or is sometimes referred to as chronic) pain. This type of pain is not beneficial and is a result of the nerves becoming over-sensitised, which means that a painful response will be triggered much more easily than normal. This can be unpleasant but doesn’t necessarily mean that you are doing yourself any harm simply by moving. You could think of this as a sensitive car alarm that goes off in error when someone walks past.
Persistent pain is very common and affects over 14 million people in the UK alone. It often does not respond to conventional medical interventions and needs a different kind of approach, but there are many things that you can do to manage your pain yourself with the support of your osteopath, your family and loved ones.
Help for chronic pain
Keeping active, performing exercises and stretches can help, learning to pace your activities so that you don’t trigger a flare-up of your pain as well as setting goals and priorities are all very important and can help you to maintain a fulfilling lifestyle. This NHS site on chronic pain may be of interest too.
Chronic pain treatment in Worthing
There are many treatment approaches which could help ease chronic pain. Often we find that a combined approach offers greater success. Chronic pain often doesn’t tend to just cause pain, but a wide list of other symptoms too. These can include, but are not limited to, tiredness, depression, stress, anxiety, digestive issues, restlessness and headaches. Treatments aim to help ease pain, but also to help improve these other issues too.
At Broadwater Osteopaths in Worthing, we may use for example, osteopathy, acupuncture, massage and reflexology with a patient. Find out more about our treatments and how they may help here.
Feel free to drop us an email or call our team on 01903 820206.
