Which Kinds of Pain are there?
Pain is divided into three groups, i.e. acute, chronic and cancerous pain. Such a division makes it easier to understand the pain and is at the same time important for choosing a treatment.
Acute Pain
Acute pain has a purpose. It tells you that the body has been damaged. You have to do something so that the body is not further damaged and the damage can heal. Far the most of us has experience pain for a shorter period – for example a few days with pain in the arm of the shoulder following an overload – this is called acute pain. That kind of pain is easy to understand and normally easy to treat. In this case, the pain is a sign that you have strained yourself. Muscles, ligaments and joints have been damaged. In that case, we know to keep the arm at rest for a few days and that ordinary painkilling medication can soothe. If our own treatment does not help, we go to see a doctor. The pain disappears when muscles, ligaments and joints have healed after a few days, where after the arm will function as normal. Even though the pain can be strong, it is bearable because we know the pain passes and that everything will return to normal.
So acute pain is brief and triggered by some form of damage to the body. However, how long is ‘brief’?
How long time does the pain have to last for it to be called chronic? Earlier on, we used to define chronic pain as something lasting more than 6 months – but that way of terming pain has been discarded. Instead, you now say that acute pain lasts as long as it empirically ‘should’. Empirically, back pain does not last longer than 12 weeks – therefore, back pain that lasts longer than 12 weeks be considered chronic pain. In the same was you know from experience that migraine lasts for a few days and that headache for several weeks therefore is chronic.
It is assumed that the damage that has been done to the body at the beginning of the illness heals as long as the acute pain lasts. So the acute lasts during the repair of the damage but when the body has healed, the pain must go away – otherwise it is termed chronic pain.
Chronic Pain
In contradiction to the acute pain, the chronic pain has no purpose.
The cause of the chronic pain is not always easy to understand – neither for the doctor or the patient – and the pain is also much more difficult to treat. A typical example is chronic back pain. With most people with chronic back pain, the doctors cannot prove that anything is wrong and although the doctors’ treatment can soothe, it cannot remove the pain completely. It is not so strange that chronic pain that can be neither explained nor removed in time affects the person both mentally and socially. You become scared and depressed. Some people lose their job or are granted early retirement benefit. Chronic pain is one of the most common causes of human suffering, disablement and reduced life quality.
So chronic pain is pain that lasts longer than what is expected – longer than most people with a certain illness. In contradiction to the acute pain, the damage to the body has healed but for some reason the pain continues and become chronic. In other cases, chronic pain arises without we are able to prove that the body has been damaged. Typical examples are whiplash injuries, back pain and headache.
Cancerous Pain
The improved treatment of cancer has first of all meant that more people live longer with their cancer illness and with it the pain that the illness often brings. More than half of all patients with cancer that are undergoing treatment (chemotherapy, radiation treatment or surgical treatment) have prolonged pain and 9 out of 10 with pervasive cancer have pain.
Almost everyone with cancer experience pain during their illness. Often, there are more causes of the pain and it changes all the time – both in nature and strength. Even though the causes of the pain are understandable, the cancer illness itself leads to insecurity and anxiety that in itself intensify the experience of pain.