For years, people with chronic pain have had to learn how to live with it. This meant going to work, participating in everyday functions with family and around their home. Today, though, thanks to research and study over the past few years, there have been great strides in helping to manage that pain.
Much has been learned about the psychological and physiological basis of pain and this has enabled experts to find ways to help either eradicate the pain altogether, or find great relief. And even better is that it has been in ways that are not by oral medications. Here we are going to look at the profile of a pain management clinic and the approach by the professional staff therein toward treating chronic pain.
Understanding Chronic Pain
Many people that complain about a continuing pain, but there is not an identifiable cause anatomically, an absence of a definitive pathology. Those people are often dismissed by doctors and others in the health profession. What pain management clinics have learned is that even though there is not any presence of an identifiable cause, doesn’t mean that the patient is not suffering from chronic pain. They have learned that a neurological feedback can actually make it harder to treat that pain.
It has become increasingly clear that there is a need for awareness among health professionals and the general public, especially employers, even though pain is essentially subjective. For instance, those with chronic back pain, many people with back pain are self-limiting and the pain will resolve on its own with the patient practicing general at-home care. However, the risk of back pain reoccurring and developing into a chronic disease is great.
Pain Management
Pain management draws from a variety of disciplines like the healing arts to science to the systematic study of pain. The parts of that systematic study are combined is: how to prevent it, how to evaluate it, how to diagnosis it and most of all, how to treat it and rehab the patient.
There is continuing clinical research in an attempt to determine which type of pain management therapy is the more effective. A pain management clinic is staffed with experts that have and still participate in that clinical research and are on the ‘cutting edge’ of treating chronic pain. In general, the techniques of pain management can be broken into groups by their invasiveness:
- Physical Therapy: Absolutely not invasive and does not involve medication
- Pain Management Techniques: Includes pharmacologic, i.e. pain medications
- Other Alternatives: Invasive techniques like injections or surgery
Noninvasive and Non-Drug Pain Management
There is a vast amount of pain management techniques that are non-drug and noninvasive, and some are widely accepted and used by pain management clinics such as the following:
- Exercise: It has been proven that physical exertion that is targeting to increase the patient’s flexibility and strength so that their normal motion is returned is most preferred. This can include aerobics, stretching exercises and water therapy such as swimming.
- Manual:The act of manipulating the areas affected by pain such as applying force to those affected joints, ligaments, and muscles is said to be very successful.
- Behavioral:Using behavioral methods has proved to optimize the response from patients, such as cognitive therapy, which involves teaching the patient to relax as a way to alleviate their pain. The patients are also taught techniques on how to cope with their pain and biofeedback is used to teach a patient how to control their muscle tension as well as their blood pressure, and heart rate.
By Audrey Thompson
