Understanding chronic pain is the first step to recovery
Our previous beliefs of chronic pain
For those of you who suffer from long periods of pain, whether it was in the back of the knee, many of you might have experienced pain fluctuations without any causative pattern. Chronic pain deters your sleep, quality of life, and psychological health. The question is, does this pain equates to tissue damage?
This blog seeks to answer:
How does pain persist even when the injury has healed?
How your perception of pain subjected to many factors in life?
How does physiotherapy serve to minimise that pain?
Pain can persist even when the tissue is healed?
We now know that you can still experience ongoing pain even if the initial tissue damage has already mended. So why are we still experiencing pain?? A recent research breakthrough from Professor Lorimer Moseley presented that pain is driven by sensory neural activities rather than actual tissue damage. That applies to those who suffer from ongoing bodily pain despite the injury sustained many years ago.
So why are we still experiencing pain?
First, you must acknowledge that your perception of pain can be cause by many factors in life.
The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) defines pain as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage. Pain is not just a physical sensation – it is an output produced by the brain. This output is influenced by:
Attitudes
Beliefs
Fear of re-injury
Personality
Social factors
Tissue stretch
Cell health
Presence of swelling
Tissue contraction
What can you do about it?
Try to understand that pain does not always equate to tissue damage.
An analogy brought about by professor Lorimer Morsley: a cut on your body without knowing when it occurred. For example, when a twig brushed past our ankle:
On a tissue level, it cut through and caused tissue damage.
That caused a reaction from the nerves.
The nerve sends a message to your spinal cord and your brain.
The brain remembers the situation, environment, consequence, and emotion connecting to this cut. All this contributes to your overall experience.
The brain decides whether this incidence is a threat or not to our survival.
Your brain may or may not deem this cut as a threat de-activate our protective response.
The brain will still signal for the scratch to heal.
Research evidence has shown that your pain perception is strongly affected by your previous experience! If your brain decides that the cut was a threat, then even if it is a small cut, you can experience extreme pain. This can also explain people's fear of needles. For example, a rugby player can withstand multiple hard tackles per game but faints at the sight of a needle.
Previous experience matters. It is formulated by:
Fear
Beliefs
Scan results can heighten your concern around their condition
Attitudes
Stress
Location and position you are in
Time of the year
Values
How does physiotherapy help you with chronic pain?
We aim to help you understand all the factors contributing to your pain and manage them through therapeutic and functional exercises. Many of those exercises will be difficult, but you will conduct them under our guidance and supervision. Under our expertise, we will make sure that you are only going to get better.
You might feel slightly more painful for the first few sessions. We will work with you to adjust the exercise intensity so that you progressively improve functionally. Throughout this process, you will be treated with manual therapy and needling techniques to mitigate your discomfort.
We need your trust and patience with our treatment
Trust our guidance, trust the process, and you will become more comfortable, and there will be less pain. That is why we are going to be with you throughout this journey of rehabilitation. It won’t be easy. This article is to give you a different perspective on pain.
The videos below will help you to keep your faith.
