What are the benefits of pain management?
Do you suffer from chronic pain, but still see a primary care physician? If so, you’re not alone; many patients see the same primary care physician for their entire adult lives because they feel very comfortable with them and prefer to receive advice from a doctor they trust. However, to truly reap all of the benefits of pain management, it is best to see a doctor trained in your specific area of chronic pain.
What is Pain Management?
Pain management is a branch of medicine that applies science to the reduction of pain. It covers a wide spectrum of conditions including neuropathic pain, sciatica, postoperative pain and more. Pain management is a rapidly growing medical specialty that takes a multi-disciplinary approach to treating all kinds of pain.
Pain management effectively helps thousands of people each year and is an area of concentration that primary care physicians, orthopedists, neurologists and other healthcare providers increasingly rely on for their patients.
What is the Goal of Pain Management?
The goal of pain management is to minimize pain when it cannot be completely eliminated.
With an accurate diagnosis and early intervention, pain management specialists also hope to reduce the severity of pain and improve the quality of life for patients. To achieve these goals, minimally invasive procedures and medications are used.
The main benefits of seeing a pain management specialist include:
- Extensive experience and training in pain management
- Access to specialty equipment and treatment options that are highly focused on specific types of chronic pain
- The ability to prescribe and manage the types of medications that can help suppress chronic pain
What Causes Chronic Pain?
Chronic pain can be caused by many different factors. Often conditions that accompany normal aging may affect bones and joints in ways that cause chronic pain. Other common causes are nerve damage and injuries that fail to heal properly.
Some kinds of chronic pain have numerous causes. Back pain, for example, may be caused by a single factor, or any combination of these factors:
- Years of poor posture
- Improper lifting and carrying of heavy objects
- Being overweight, which puts excess strain on the back and knees
- A congenital condition such as curvature of the spine
- Traumatic injury
- Wearing high heels
- Sleeping on a poor mattress
- No obvious physical cause
- Ordinary aging of the spine (degenerative changes)
Disease can also be the underlying cause of chronic pain. Rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis and fibromyalgia are well-known culprits, but persistent pain may also be due to such ailments as cancer, multiple sclerosis, stomach ulcers, AIDS, and gallbladder disease.
In many cases, however, the source of chronic pain can be a very complex and even mysterious issue to untangle. Although it may begin with an injury or illness, ongoing pain can develop a psychological dimension after the physical problem has healed. This fact alone makes pinning down a single course of treatment tricky, and it is why health care providers often find they have to try a number of different types of curative steps.
Importance of Controlling Pain
Inadequately managed pain can lead to adverse physical and psychological patient outcomes for individual patients and their families. Continuous, unrelieved pain activates the pituitary-adrenal axis, which can suppress the immune system and result in postsurgical infection and poor wound healing. Sympathetic activation can have negative effects on the cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and renal systems, predisposing patients to adverse events such as cardiac ischemia and ileus. Of particular importance to nursing care, unrelieved pain reduces patient mobility, resulting in complications such as deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolus, and pneumonia. Postsurgical complications related to inadequate pain management negatively affect the patient’s welfare and the hospital performance because of extended lengths of stay and readmissions, both of which increase the cost of care.
Continuous, unrelieved pain also affects the psychological state of the patient and family members. Common psychological responses to pain include anxiety and depression. The inability to escape from pain may create a sense of helplessness and even hopelessness, which may predispose the patient to a more chronic depression. Patients who have experienced inadequate pain management may be reluctant to seek medical care for other health problems. (For more detail, go to the section, “Harmful Effects of Unrelieved Pain,” below.)
The Power Of This Sense Of Self-Confidence Cannot Be Overestimated.
Self-Esteem
Learning to self-manage pain, including tapering opioids, is a therapy that increases people’s ability to cope with pain because it is a shame reducing, empowering experience that fosters self-confidence. In other words, it is a self-esteem building exercise.
Prior to engaging in this learning process, patients tend to see pain as an alarming experience that they need to avoid by taking opioids and as a consequence they tend to feel bad about themselves for having to rely on opioids. They tend to feel sensitive and defensive about their need for opioids, but nevertheless continue their use because pain is so alarming that it seems it must be gotten rid of. This dilemma wears on their sense of who they believe they should be. In other words, the dilemma wears on their self-esteem.
By learning to self-manage pain without opioids, patients come face to face with their pain and learn that they can still live well even if pain is present. In this way, they overcome the sense of alarm that pain can generate and come to see that it doesn’t have to be avoided at all costs. They come to see that they don’t have to pay the price of shame that comes with needing to rely on opioids to get rid of pain. They overcome the fear of pain and come to see that they can live with it. They come to even see that they can live well. This empowering experience allows them to feel good about themselves again. They take back control of their lives.
Learning to self-manage chronic pain, including tapering opioids, is thus a therapy that when done under the guidance of expert healthcare providers in a chronic pain rehabilitation clinic produces improved psychological well-being: acceptance of what is, empowerment, self-confidence, self-esteem, and the ability to successfully self-manage chronic pain.