Three Pain Classifications

Friend or Foe, You Need to Know

The pain classifications are broken into three sections.

• Acute
• Chronic
• Metastatic

In the previous section we learned that pain can be our friend. In most cases it is a foe. Here you will learn about the pain classifications. This is the basis for pain management, natural pain relief, chronic pain relief.

This is also essential to identify the right pain medication for the best results.

Note...many older publications use only two classifications. As you will learn here, there are rightly three.

Got Pain?

Everybody experiences pain at some point in their life. A tooth ache, splinter, bee sting, cut, sprain, broken arm or leg, to the more traumatic, we all will experience pain.

It can warn us, we can learn from it. It will cause us to protect ourselves. Some pain feels good, such as the pain of exercise after a strenuous work out. However, over done, that pain can turn from pleasure into something undesirable.

For the most part, it is human nature to avoid pain. It is unpleasant.

Pain affects over 50 Million North Americans alone (Congressional Briefing on Pain, June 13, 2006). It was spoken of as the silent epidemic. Yet when considering that there are three pain classifications, even the moves to care for it seem to not fully comprehend beyond the suffering. No one should suffer.

What if there were a way to reduce suffering and...

1) Heal the tissue faster and eliminate the cause of the pain transduction?
2) Heal the infection or inflammation faster and eliminate the transduction?
3) Heal the neurological tissues that might misfire or wrongly transmit the pain?
4) Boost the neurological ability to enhance the modulation and perception?

If this was possible, it would seem it could be a radically new way to treat pain.

Before answering these questions consider the different pain classifications...

Acute Pain

Acute pain is the uncomfortable feeling caused by tissue damage or injury that goes away with healing of the injury. It is caused by such things as trauma, injury, burns, infection, inflammation, cancer, and surgery. Deep tissue acute pain can result from strains, sprains and broken bones.

It can produce changes in the autonomic nervous system resulting in rapid heart rate, sweating, and high blood pressure. It can also create stress that makes normal activities of daily living intolerable during the time it is being experienced. It can cause loss of sleep.

Acute pain is considered to be short in duration or the length of time before the pain is totally resolved would be typically less than three to six months.

Treatment is often secondary to treating the cause combining strategies and sometimes modalities to promote the healing and manage the pain.

So a back surgery to eliminate back pain during the healing process might include magnet therapy (during hospital stay), anti-inflammatory medication (inflammation causes pain and decreases healing), antibiotics (infection can cause pain and slow down healing) along with a narcotic pain medication first given intravenously then orally when it can be tolerated.

An important pain management tool often used in the hospital is the simple exercise of walking. All of these and more are part of the treatment of acute pain.

It should be noted that acute pain can be our friend. It tells us when something is wrong. When all is well, it leaves us alone.

Chronic Pain

Chronic pain on the other hand is pain that previously was described as lasting three to six months or longer. It has well been said that if acute pain is a short illness, chronic pain is a disease.

There is a move to define chronic pain classification as the disease of pain.

It is often misunderstood by many aspects of the health care profession, including doctors and nurses. Perhaps this is because it has little relationship with acute pain.

What About Addiction

It is not uncommon to hear both doctors and nurses make judgment calls about a patients dealing with pain as drug seeking, it's all in their head and similar comments. Many older doctors will make comments of the nature to indicate that the medical profession created numerous addicts in our society.

However, in numerous studies have demonstrated that the risk of addiction is less than 1% for those who use opioid's whether they use them for 1 to 3 days or 3 to 6 months. One study from the 90's looked at 15,000 patients with chronic pain who were using narcotic drugs to manage the pain. Only 7 were found to be dependent, not addicted, only dependent.

Chronic pain leads to other suffering including depression, isolation, helplessness and hopelessness.

The most common cause of chronic pain include low back pain, headache, recurrent facial pain and arthritic pain.

So what is a person to do when faced with chronic pain?

Consider what one study said...

In 2006 it was reported by one study (Harris Interactive (R) sponsored by PriCara (TM) http://www.painandwork.com) 89 Percent or almost 9 out of ten employees with chronic pain go to work with the pain. The study pointed to the need of these patients becoming advocates for themselves and work with their health care provider to identify treatment options that will be appropriate.

This is perhaps one of the contributing factors in pain sufferers taking responsibility for their pan management themselves. To do so still requires an understanding as to what pain is, what it does and how to best treat it given the circumstances one is faced with.

The Third of the Pain Classifications

Only recently has the science of pain management begun to recognize the third classification of metastatic pain or cancer pain. It can rightly be called a third classification as the pain is unique from the other types in that it manifests as both acute and chronic pain.

It has a second unique characteristic in that the pain can be caused by the disease, the treatments or both.

Cancer Pain has been defined as a syndrome.

These are the pain classifications. Now consider the...

Types of Pain

So, what are the types of pain that would fall into the three pain classifications?

What are the Types of Pain? in the next section will answer that question.

Glutathione Disease Cure: The Pain Classifications Resource

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