Chronic Pain: From Hurt to Help, a Look at Pain

A few weeks ago Mike Verplancke, Jeff Verhagen and I had the pleasure of attending a seminar entitled, “Behavioral Treatment of Chronic Pain, Evidence based techniques to move people form HURT to HOPE”. It reinforced what we already know about pain. But as always, there is always something important to learn from any course.

Based on The International Association for the Study of Pain, Pain is defined as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage”. Another popular definition is “whatever the experiencing person says it is, existing whenever he or she says it does”. Bottom line, Your Pain, is Your Pain! We tend to categorize Pain as “Acute” or “Chronic”.

If interested, watch this video Understanding Pain in less than 5 minutes, and what to do about it!

There is HELP, there is HOPE!

We also often use the phrase, “The Pain is in your Brain”, but the cool thing is the brain has the ability to be re-trained, it is plastic which is the beauty of the human body, so please keep the faith, there is HOPE, there is HELP, you just need to find clinicians that understand pain and know how to treat chronic pain. Acute pain has some emotional component, Chronic Pain a much larger emotional component and as a result a more significant impact on the quality of your life! Most social support goes to Acute Pain. With Chronic Pain, because it is harder to treat, can be more socially isolating, less support, more fear, etc. At Freedom, our therapists, understand pain, know how to treat pain, and want to work with you to manage your pain and help direct your care to other providers who are compassionate and knowledgeable about pain.