Pain Management Elk Grove CA

Pain Management

Provided By: 

Article Medically Reviewed By:

Diana J. Wilkie, PhD, RN, FAAN

Professor and Harriet Werley Endowed Chair for Nursing Research Department of Medical-Surgical Nursing University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Nursing Chicago, IL

Overview

What Is It?
Pain is a complicated combination of emotional, chemical and physical components. Treating and managing it often requires several approaches, including over-the-counter or prescription medications, physical therapy, lifestyle changes and coping skills.

Pain is one of the most common human experiences. Yet pain has never been fully accepted as a medical problem. One reason may be because pain is a subjective and highly individualized experience. You can measure pain even though you can't touch it, feel it (unless it's your own), image it or prove its existence. Even a pinprick creates differing sensations of pain for different people.

Nevertheless, chronic pain affects more than 70 million Americans.

Pain is the body's way of sending a warning to the brain that something is wrong. Aches are felt when pain messages, carried by chemicals called neurotransmitters, travel from the nerves, along the spinal cord to the brain. In the brain, pain messages are meshed with thoughts, emotions and expectations that shape our interpretation and response to pain.

Both emotions and drugs can change the perception of pain because both affect neurotransmitter levels. Both emotions and chemicals also alter the amount of endorphins, the body's natural pain relievers, which block the relay of pain messages to the brain. Depending on your mood and mental state, pain messages can be slowed, strengthened or stopped entirely. For example, fear, anger and worry can mask or heighten pain, while calming, positive thoughts can ease it.

There are two types of pain. "Nociceptive" pain is pain caused by tissue damage in the skin, muscles, bone or internal organs. Joint pain caused by arthritis, for instance, is an example of nociceptive pain. "Neuropathic" pain involves the nerve cells that transmit pain messages to the brain because either the nerves themselves are damaged or because they are not functioning properly and are sending out persistent messages.

You may hear nociceptive and neuropathic pain referred to as "acute" and "chronic" pain. Pain specialists prefer the terms nociceptive and neuropathic because they better define the parameters of the pain experience. The more scientific terms enable clinicians to zero in on where and how to begin diagnosis and treatment.

These newer classifications are important because they are based on current understanding of pain pathophysiology of the nervous system. The terms, "acute pain" and "chronic pain" are not accurate because there is no time relationship between when pain changes from being acute to being chronic. An arbitrary time frame—typically three months—was identified as the point at which the pain experience changed from acute to chronic. But t...

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