Is your pain acute or chronic?
Pain is an localised or generalised unpleasant bodily sensation or complex of sensations that causes mild to severe physical discomfort and emotional distress.
Pain, whilst unpleasant, can be a very useful sensation to have. Short-term or ‘acute’ pain helps us learn from our experiences and protects us from future injury. It is part of our natural healing process.
Pain signals use the spinal cord and specialised nerve fibres to travel to our brain. This involves our whole body, It is more than just a network of wires. These fibres also work to process the pain signals. All together they work like a very powerful computer.
Sometimes this computer system can go wrong, the messages get confused and the brain cannot understand the signals properly. It can lead to chronic or persistent pain.
We can categorise pain into acute or chronic pain, below is some identifiers of acute vs chronic.
Acute pain
Rapid onset
Can be associated with signs of inflammation (swelling, redness, bruising, heat)
Short term up to 12 weeks
Responds well to analgesics (pain killers)
Chronic pain
May start off acute but becomes persistent
Cause can be unclear
Not usually associated with signs of inflammation, however swelling may be apparent
Long term 3 months +
May be due to underlying disease
How can Midtown Wellness Osteopaths help you?
Osteopaths are able to assess and examine you to establish the potential causes of pain and recommend a treatment plan or advise if you should be referred to a GP or other healthcare practitioner. This would be if your pain requires further investigation such as blood tests, X-RAY/MRI.
Your Osteopath may prescribe graded exercises to do at home, lifestyle advice and provide manual such as Osteopathy, massage and Medical acupuncture to help with the discomfort.
