Do you think about your pain all the time? Does the pain impact on your day-to-day enjoyment? Is your sleeping pattern disturbed because of your pain? Are you more irritated around your friends and family because of your pain? Have you become more isolated because of your pain?
Did you know that you are not alone. 1 in 5 individuals suffer from chronic pain. Therefore 20% of the people you meet today are likely to suffer pain.
But why is it some individuals seem to “manage” their pain better than others. This can be related to several different reasons and include:
- The nature or type of the pain experienced
- Your “genetic make up”
- How long you have suffered pain
- The exposure you had to pain as a child
- What you have “learnt” from others over your lifetime with regard to how to cope with pain and the stress it brings with it.
- Some individuals are “high pain” thresholds and others have less ability to cope with chronic pain.
What you need to remember is that Everybody has the ability to deal with pain!
Modern pain management
Modern pain medicine has meant that we understand more about chronic pain pathways that we ever did before and we have more analgesic medicine available to us now than ever before. So we should be ideally placed to treat pain shouldn’t we?
What is the commonest reason treatment fails?
Interestingly, many chronic individuals with chronic pain “avoid” taking regular pain killers (analgesics) because of the fear of been “dependent” on tablets. Well, if this is you think again.
If you were suffering from a medical condition such as high blood pressure (hypertension) you would take you blood pressure tablets. I can hear you saying yes.
If you had an infection you would take your antibiotics? I see more nodding heads.
So why then if you have the disease known as “chronic pain” do you want to avoid take you analgesic (pain medications)?
Often finding the best combination to manage your pain is a challenge but with the newest agents available there are more opportunity that ever to offer you control. You should make an appointment with your pain specialist and discuss the options to ensure you are using your analgesics (pain killers) correctly and safety.
