Pain Management
What is Pain?
According to The International
Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), the definition of
pain is: “An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience
associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or
described in terms of such damage… The inability to
communicate verbally does not negate the possibility that an
individual is experiencing pain and is in need of appropriate
pain-relieving treatment. Pain is always subjective… pain is
that experience we associate with actual or potential tissue
damage. It is unquestionably a sensation in a part or parts of
the body, but it is also always unpleasant and therefore also
an emotional experience.”
Pain is the second most common
reason that people visit doctors, exceeded only by cold and
upper respiratory infections.
While acute pain is a normal
sensation triggered in the nervous system to alert you to
possible injury and the need to take care of yourself, chronic
pain is different. Chronic pain persists. Pain signals keep
firing in the nervous system for weeks, months, even years.
There may have been an initial injury -- sprained back, a
broken bone, a serious infection, or there may be an ongoing
cause of pain -- arthritis, cancer, a herniated disc. Some
people who are diagnosed with fibromyalgia suffer chronic pain
in the absence of any past injury or evidence of body damage.
Common chronic pain complaints include headache, low back
pain, cancer pain, arthritis pain and neurogenic pain (pain
resulting from damage to the peripheral nerves or to the
central nervous system itself) such as Reflex Sympathetic
Dystrophy (RSD).
Is there any treatment?
Pain is complex, so there are many
treatment options:
What is the prognosis?
Many people with chronic pain can
be helped if they understand all the causes of pain and the
many and varied steps that can be taken to undo what chronic
pain has done.
Visit Indian
Shores Walk-In Clinic Today
Phone: (727) 517-1500
Monday - Friday, 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
20001 Gulf Blvd., Suite 7, Indian Shores, FL 33785 |
