Pains

The word pain can signify different things that have nothing else in common than personal discomfort. A person with headache does not mean the same thing by being in pain as the one in painful sorrow or a cancer patient. In other words, pain is something unique to each individual and is not measurable, you have to believe it. It is the same with art, love and joy – they too cannot be measured, you must experience them.

Pain can be a sign that the body is damaged by an illness or accident. However, pain can also arise without such damage can be proved. Traditionally, pain is divided into acute and chronic pain.

Acute pain is brief and is caused by some kind of injury to the body. Far most of us have experienced acute pain – for example a few days with pain in the arm or the shoulder because of an overload. That kind of pain is comprehensible and normally easy to treat. Here, pain is a sign that you have been pressing yourself too hard. Muscles, tendons and joints have been damaged. In that case, we know to relieve the arm for some days and that ordinary painkilling medication can soothe. The pain disappears when muscles, tendons and joints have healed up for some days and the arm then functions as before. Even though the pain may be strong, it is durable because we know is passes and everything returns to normal again.

On the contrary, chronic pain is prolonged and the cause is not always clear. Chronic pain is pain that lasts longer than expected – longer than most who has a certain illnesses. From experience, we know that back pains do not last longer than 12 weeks – therefore, back pain that lasts longer than 12 weeks is called chronic pain. The damage done to the back has healed by for some reason the pain continues and become chronic. With most people with chronic pain in the back, the doctors cannot proof that anything is wrong and their treatment may soothe but cannot remove the pain entirely.

Further reading on chronic pain.