Pain is the normal reaction to an illness or an injury. It’s a warning sign that something is wrong. Once your body heals, it usually stops hurting unless you have chronic pain.
How is chronic pain diagnosed? While the medical community has made many advancements when it comes to understanding how people experience pain, diagnosing and assessing a person’s chronic pain is not a straightforward process. It might require a bit of trial and error.
How Is Chronic Pain Diagnosed?
When people experience pain on a chronic basis, the cause is usually countless biomedical, psychosocial and behavioral factors, such as the individual’s mood, beliefs and expectations, in addition to context and the response from a spouse or partner. Assessing each area using a comprehensive evaluation process is one way that medical professionals gauge an individual’s chronic pain. Understanding how and why pain is occurring allows the medical community to develop a treatment program.
How is chronic pain diagnosed? When you visit your doctor to discuss the pain that you’re experiencing, he or she will likely ask you the following questions: When did you start feeling the pain? Where are you experiencing the pain? Can you describe the pain? Is it sharp, throbbing, aching or burning? Can you rate the degree of the pain on a scale from one to 10? Is there anything that increases the pain or initiates it? Is there anything that relieves it?
When Pain Continues After the Cause Is Gone
For many people, pain remains long after the cause of the pain is gone. If pain lasts for six months or longer, then medical professionals consider it to be a chronic condition. When you experience pain day after day, it will affect your emotional and physical health. According to estimates, around 25% of people who experience chronic pain develop chronic pain syndrome, or CPS. This is when an individual experiences symptoms that are more than just pain, such as anxiety and depression, and that interfere with their everyday life. It can be tough to treat CPS, but it is possible. It may require a combination of treatments, including physical therapy, relaxation and counseling. These techniques may relieve your pain in addition to the other symptoms that have arisen because of it.
How Is Chronic Pain Diagnosed for CPS?
Medical experts aren’t sure what causes CPS. Most people report that it starts with a painful condition or an injury like back pain, arthritis or a muscle strain. It could also be something like broken bones, cancer or surgery. The origins of CPS are physical and mental. Some medical experts believe that people who suffer from the condition have a problem with their body’s system of nerves and glands, the ones that control stress. It’s possible that this makes them experience pain differently. Other medical professionals believe that the condition is a learned one. When your body is dealing with pain, you may begin repeating certain behaviors after it is less or gone completely. Men and women both develop CPS, but women develop it more often. Individuals who have severe depression or other mental health issues are also more likely to get CPS.
What Are the Symptoms of CPS?
CPS affects your emotions, physical health and personal relationships. It can lead to other symptoms like depression, anxiety, insomnia, fatigue, feelings of guilt, irritability, drug or alcohol abuse or job loss.
To manage CPS, some people find themselves taking more and more pain medication, causing drug dependency. This is more frustrating since the pain resulted in another serious problem developing.
A Complete Approach to Pain Management
Determining a person’s pain requires various assessments. At the Encore Health Group, we offer different techniques for pain management in Tennessee to treat your pain. Our treatment techniques include general pain management, counseling and medication-assisted therapy. We know that while one treatment technique works for one person, you may need something different for pain management in Tennessee.
