Acute Pain
Pain is confusing. It's important to get our ideas about it straight or it can cause misunderstandings and conflict.
We think of acute pain in ways we have been brought up to, and this is usually OK most of the time.
When we get a long-term problem however, our usual ways of understanding pain don't fit so well and we start feeling a conflict between what we understand and what is happening to us.
The Nature Of Pain
Pain is complex and not easily classified, but it is helpful to think of it in terms of acute or chronic pain for the purpose of understanding what's going on. Only then is is possible to move on to a better realisation of the situation and to start to plan the long-term management of your life.
Acute Pain
What Is Acute Pain? Many of us think that an acute pain is a pain which is sharp or shooting, but the technical definition is more interesting for our story.
Acute Pain Is Recent
Let's go through what acute pain means as we need to understand that before we move on to the more complex and difficult case of chronic pain.
Acute pain does not say anything about the severity of the pain or the injury which might be involved. A severe bone fracture or a mild headache could be acute, because they have come on recently.
What Is Acute Pain Telling Us?
The message of acute pain is "Warning! Tissue damage occurring or likely, unless you take action". This is a survival mechanism, forcing us to take some action to prevent further injury and damage. We usually can't ignore this message even if we want to.
Our Reaction To Acute Pain
Well, if you are like me, you take action of some kind, you change your behaviour. This is the point of acute pain, it is meant to force us to take action, to do something about the cause of the pain or the damage which has been inflicted.
The Healing Process
The problem begins to settle down and the pain subsides, leaving us to go back to normal.
We call this a useful pain where HURT=HARM. When this kind of pain occurs then damage is occurring to our tissues and therefore pain means injury, and it is useful because it protects us, warning us about dangerous activities and forcing us to take action to heal ourselves when necessary.
What Would Happen If We Couldn't Feel Pain?
Yes, I know it's hard to believe, but there are some people (very few) who are born without the ability to feel pain in any way. There seems to be nothing different in these people apart from their inability to feel pain. However, you would be wrong if you thought this was a good thing. No pain! How wonderful, you might think. But it's not.
Imagine how it would be if we had to bring up children who were unable to feel pain at all. You would never know when they were ill, or had damaged themselves.
If they had hurt themselves quite badly, they would keep on doing what they were doing and not take any action to rest or heal themselves. Overall, these unfortunate people have huge problems throughout their lives and do not live very long, often into their early twenties.
So, pain has a very important protective and survival function which keeps us alive. Without pain we could not grow up to be adults and do all the things we want to.
How Would You Like To Control Your Pain And Reclaim Your Life?
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