But pain is a very complex phenomenon, with many more components than just severity. So a single numerical value based on severity does not take into account the impact it can have on a patient’s daily life, such as their activities, relationships, ability to sleep, happiness, and overall life satisfaction.
I think the hardest thing, actually, about the many forms of chronic pain, is that you can’t see it. There’s no valid external way to know how much pain someone is feeling in their body. We have newer ways of measuring pain that try to get at some of these more complex aspects, but it’s still a very incomplete science. It’s all still subjective, based on what the patient says about their experience.
What are some promising new options for treating pain?
A popular treatment recently is called Pain Reprocessing Therapywhich takes a behavioral approach to eliminate it.
In our medical field, therapists guide patients to understand the causes of chronic pain and then reappraise sensations they find painful—for example, when engaging in movements that are normally painful. The goal of reprocessing therapy is to help the pain signals sent to the brain be perceived as less threatening, so that the brain “gets rid” of them. Pain.
Another approach that is being applied in new ways is called nerve removala procedure in which the nerves surrounding the area of pain are numb with medication and then deliberately damaged. In these cases, doctors inject a chemical around the nerves or gently heat them so that they can’t effectively send pain signals for months or even years. This approach has been used to treat spinal pain for decades, but it’s now being applied more widely to other areas of the body.
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