Pain is our body’s way of alerting us that something is wrong with it. Different pain management solutions depend on the intensity and type of pain experienced.
Types of Pain
The two main types of pain include:
Acute Pain – usually begins suddenly and is typically short-lived. It’s a normal response of the body to a sudden event like falls, surgery, fractures, burns, cuts, or infections. A physician can treat acute pain immediately after the event that resulted in the pain.
Chronic Pain – is long-lasting pain, generally longer than three months. This is an outcome of some condition, trauma, or disease. Chronic pain can be relieved effectively by pain management doctors.
Consult on Need: If you have pain that doesn’t go away over a long period, it would be best to consult our Pain Management Clinic sooner than later. Chronic pain usually does not go away on its own and requires treatment in order to relieve it.
What is Pain Management?
The techniques used for reducing and controlling the intensity of pain experienced by a person over the long term comprise advanced pain management. At times, any one technique alone may not be effective and might need to be used with other techniques for better results.
1. Drug Therapy
Whether prescription or non-prescription, pain medicines are frequently used by people.
NSAIDs (Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) like naproxen, aspirin, and ibuprofen relieve pain caused due to stiffness or muscle aches. They’re also effective in reducing inflammation (swelling, irritation, and redness).
Topical pain relievers or local anesthetics like creams, sprays, lotions, and drops are applied over the skin. These are used for relieving pain or inflammation caused by arthritis or sore muscles.
Paracetamol is the go-to medicine for the relief of short-term pain.
Opioids like morphine, oxycodone, and codeine are used for extreme pain or cancer patients.
Anti-epilepsy or anti-depressants are used for nerve pain.
An Informed Choice: When over-the-counter drugs don’t work in providing relief, our pain management doctors will provide the patient with more effective treatment methods that work better.
2. Physical Therapy
Several physical techniques are used to stretch and strengthen joints and muscles. These usually relieve pain throughout the body, with specific techniques varying by the part of the body with pain.
Massage manipulates the soft tissues and is effective in combination with other advanced pain management treatments, including medications and therapy.
Acupuncture is the application of thin needles to the skin at specific points of the body. It helps manage certain types of pain and provides brief relief from pain in the neck, lower back, osteoarthritis, and knee.
Exercise helps in the long-term reduction of pain and improves flexibility, tones the muscles, and strengthens the body. The body’s natural painkillers – endorphins, help in the process.
Chiropractic treatment is commonly used to treat back pain. However, this non-surgical method might not be effective in treating chronic pain in the back and neck.
Need of the Hour: At times, physical therapy, when combined with medications, is highly effective in interventional pain management. Based on the doctor’s advice, a patient could be treated with both.
3. Psychological Therapies
Accommodating pain are feelings of anger, restlessness, despair, and/or sadness. Indirectly, these have negative impacts on your personality, sleep patterns, work, and relationships. With stress, lack of sleep, anxiety, and depression, the pain, in turn, gets worse.
Psychological therapy is a non-drug-based treatment that reduces the increasing levels of physiological stress and aggravating pain.
Cognitive behavior therapy helps reduce anxiety about pain and helps improve the quality of life. However, there is no evidence that this technique can reduce long-term pain.
Electromyographic biofeedback alerts the patient of the ways that muscle tension contributes to pain and helps in learning how to control it.
Hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis use refocusing techniques to help the patient block or transform the pain.
Stress-Free Pain Relief: The stress and anxiety that pain brings with it can be quite taxing. Psychological therapies offered at our Center for Pain Management could prove effective in preventing it from taking a toll on your health.
4. Injections and Stimulations
These are a part of interventional pain management techniques. Most common techniques include:
TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation Therapy) where electrical stimulation is used to reduce pain. This pain-free technique could effectively mask pain like diabetic neuropathy but not chronic low back pain.
Radiofrequency Ablation is effective for arthritis-caused neck pain and lower back pain. Radio waves are used to generate an electrical current that heats a nerve tissue area to decrease pain signals.
Injections are used for different types of pain at different spots of the body. Typically, it includes a numbing agent and a steroid.
Interventional Needs: For a quick impact, interventional forms of pain relief are adopted by our pain management doctors. At times, these work to provide immediate relief.
5. Alternative Therapy
Apart from the advanced pain management solutions listed so far, there are some alternative methods used quite often. While there is limited scientific evidence to support these alternative therapies of pain relief, people have found pain relief through these.
Therapeutic touch and Reiki healing work in self-healing and pain reduction. These ‘energy-based’ techniques involve close physical proximity between the patient and practitioner.
Relaxation therapy, including yoga or meditation, reduces the stress that accompanies pain when practiced regularly.
Tai chi incorporates breath control and gentle movements that strengthen and stretch the muscles.
Music therapy is used to relieve pain pre-and post-surgery and childbirth. Classical music, especially, has been known to work well.
Herbal remedies involve the use of herbs like ginger, turmeric, willow bark, cat claw, etc. Herbal preparations are used for pain management; however, they may interact with doctor-prescribed drugs. Hence, one needs to exercise caution and keep the physician informed.
Dietary approaches involve modifying the fat intake and/or consuming plant-based food with anti-inflammatory properties.
Nutritional Supplements like fish oil and SAMe are supposedly beneficial to reducing pain as well, although further research is required.
The Most Commonly Used Pain Relief Alternatives: Some traditional and some modern techniques that help relieve pain require more research to back the effectiveness. However, this doesn’t stop people from trying these.
6. Pain Management Clinic
While most types of pain can be reduced or controlled with one or more of the mentioned techniques, at times, debilitating pain can remain, regardless of the treatment approach. In such situations, special care centers help people deal with the pain that can’t be treated by other means. These provide inpatient and outpatient treatment and are also referred to as Pain Management Clinic.
There are physical therapists, physicians, and psychologists involved in the treatment process, apart from the active role of the patient. The techniques that are employed at our Center for Pain Management help alleviate pain while also teaching the patient with chronic pain how to deal with the pain.
At Collegedale Physical Medicine in Ooltewah, TN, most patients have reported about a 50% improved reduction in pain, especially for chronic pain sufferers. In addition to learning how to cope with the pain, they’re also encouraged to resume normal activities.