Causes and Complications of Chronic Pain – How to Manage
Pain becomes chronic when it continues after the healing time of the injury. This pain can hang on for months or even years and often causes depression in its sufferers. Chronic pain can also occur as the result of an ongoing condition, like fibromyalgia, arthritis, or cancer. Back injuries, carpal tunnel syndrome, and migraine headaches are some other examples of conditions that cause chronic pain. Some pain can result from injury to the nerves causing them send false signals to the brain. How massage affects your pain is partly dependent on its source.
If your pain is caused by a muscle injury massage can not only help ease the pain but also help speed the healing process. Acute or chronic – these are the two words that describe pain. Acute goes away easily and rarely lasts long. Chronic is its exact opposite. Chronic pain can last for six months and is expected to recur at anytime. The main cause of it is very hard to pinpoint. And it doesn’t help if doctors were more interested in addressing the pains rather than knowing what is actually causing it. As such, chronic pain relief can be elusive to patients.
But then again, there are certain medicines and therapies that are deemed effective for chronic pain. There are also a lot of medicines sold over-the-counter, which can truly help. While chronic pain is a major problem, patients do have options to treat it. Doctors normally prescribe medicines, antidepressants, and anticonvulsants, to address chronic pain. Chronic pain relief is also possible with physical therapy. Physical therapy corresponds to the low-impact exercises like swimming, walking, and stretching. If done regularly, these simple exercises can help your body a lot. It can help lower the intensity of the pain you’re going through.
However, these exercises are best performed along a trained physical therapist. Both occupational and behavioral therapies could also help. In occupational therapy, patients are thought how to pace and condition themselves when doing everyday tasks. Don’t get discouraged if you are one of the chronic pain sufferers for which a cause cannot be found. An unknown source doesn’t make the pain any less real. Fibromyalgia, for example, causes widespread pain in muscles and joints.
Yet, a person with fibromyalgia may not know the cause of the pain A healthcare provider may be able to link fibromyalgia to an injury or virus; but in other cases, a specific cause may go unidentified. Irritable bowel syndrome is another example of chronic pain for which the specific cause may not be known. Chronic pain may be related to changes in your nerve signals after a healed injury. Chronic pain may also be related to heightened pain sensitivity when your body produces lower than normal levels of painkilling endorphins. If you suffer from chronic pain do not ignore the warning signals. If you try to tough it out, the disease, illness, or injury may get worse. Left untreated, chronic pain can also mentally wear you down. Making massage therapy part of your treatment routine could help ease your pain and lessen your dependence on pain killing drugs. In the long run this will lead to less drug side effects and better health.
Tags: chronic pain, common cold, fibromyalgia, pain
cheap drugs such as Naltrexone May Ease Fibromyalgia Symptoms
April 17, 2009 — An inexpensive drug called naltrexone may make a good treatment for fibromyalgia, report researchers at Stanford University.
Naltrexone isn’t a new drug; it’s been around for more than 30 years and is used to treat opioid addiction.
Stanford’s Jarred Younger, PhD, and Sean Mackey, MD, PhD, tested a low dose of naltrexone as a fibromyalgia treatment in 10 women who had had fibromyalgia for about 10 years, on average.
First, the women spent two weeks recording the severity of their fibromyalgia symptoms every day using a handheld computer. And they took lab tests to gauge their fibromyalgia pain and sensitivity to heat and cold.
After that, the women took a placebo pill every day for two weeks, but they didn’t know it was a placebo pill. At the end of the placebo period, the women took a naltrexone pill once a day for eight weeks. Finally, they spent the last two weeks of the study not taking naltrexone or the placebo.
All along, the women continued to rate their fibromyalgia symptoms every day, and they repeated their lab tests every two weeks.
While taking the placebo, the women reported a 2.3% drop in the severity of their fibromyalgia symptoms, compared to their symptom ratings at the start of the study.
When they switched from the placebo to naltrexone, they reported an additional 30% drop in their fibromyalgia symptom severity.
The women also showed greater tolerance for pain and for hot (but not cold) temperatures while taking naltrexone.
Most of the women — six out of 10 — responded to naltrexone.
Side effects were mild and brief.
Two women reported having more vivid dreams during the study, and one woman reported transient nausea and insomnia during the first few nights of taking the pills, note Younger and Mackey.
The study, which appears online in Pain Medicine, was a small, preliminary project to see if low-dose naltrexone showed promise. It did, so Younger and Mackey are already working on a new study that will test low-dose naltrexone in 30 fibromyalgia patients for 16 weeks.
