Understanding Pain

The International Association for the Study of  Pain (IASP) defines pain as:
an unpleasant sensory and/or  emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in term of such damage.  Pain is actually a message sent along the nerves to let the brain know that something is damaging the body. The brain responds by sending a message to the muscles or organ to take action.

In the medical world, all pain is divided into two categories: acute pain and chronic pain.

Acute pain is temporary, and goes away quickly. It's useful, since it usually warns you of sources of harm and tells your body to protect itself while it's healing.

Chronic pain is pain that is unpleasant and lasts for prolonged periods of time. Generally if you've been experiencing pain in the same place for 3 months or more, that pain is likely to be classified as chronic. Since it lasts so long, it does not serve as a useful warning.

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Pain Treatment Options

Pain treatment begins with an assessment of the severity of the pain. Commonly, the first steps of treatment are rest, application of cold or heat and intake of OTC (over the counter) medication.

The next step in the treatment of pain is a combination of physical therapy and prescribed pain medication. It is important to note that sometimes, interventional pain management needs to be started prior to Physical Therapy in order to stop acute pain (i.e. acute radiculopathy) and allow the patient to comply with necessary exercise.  

If prescribed pain medication and physical therapy don't work, the next step is usually interventional pain management, unless the patient has acute loss of function or acute neurological deficit (in which case surgery is needed).

If interventional pain management doesn't alleviate the pain, surgery might be required. However, even after surgery interventional pain management has a very important role in the treatment of patients, especially when all other options are exhausted (ex. "failed back surgery" syndrome).