Your Pain Treatment Options

Pain can be a incapacitating condition, but there are ways to keep it out of control. Learn about different pain managing options.

Whether your pain is from arthritis, cancer treatments,  or an old injury, you need to find a way to get your pain out of control. What's the best approach to do that?The first step in pain managing is scheduling an appointment with your doctor to determine the cause of your pain and learn which pain management approach is regularly the most effective for it. There are many different pain managing options available: You can find the right treatment variation to get the relief you need.Before you try to treat your pain, it's important to understand how pain is defined.

"The International Association for the Study of Pain came up with a consensus statement," says Judith Scheman, PhD, program director of the Chronic Pain Rehabilitation Program at the Cleveland hospital in Ohio. "Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience. I think that's particularly important. When we focus only on the sensory aspect, we fail to understand the suffering component of the pain, which is important to identify because pain is not what occurs at the periphery."

Why Do People Experience Pain another way?

Pain is real and it's physical — there's no mistaking that. But pain is deliberate and specific to one person based on that person's insight of the pain, and that's why everyone's pain is different.

"What the brain perceives is indisputably modifiable by emotions," notes Scheman. That means that people who are fearful of pain, depressed, or concerned may experience pain differently, and possibly more severely, than someone who has pain but isn't experiencing those other emotions.

Pain Management: Treating Mind and Body

Scheman stresses the importance of approaching pain both physically and emotionally and addressing "people as entire human beings.” So while chronic pain drug can be effective and important for pain managing for many people, it isn't the only tool available when it comes to pain treatment, and it shouldn't be the only apparatus that's used.

Medications. "There are a lot of medications that are prearranged for pain," says Scheman, although she notes that opioids and benzodiazepines may not be the best options. Those treatments "have their own harms, and there are no good study on using opioids for long periods of time for the action of constant pain."

Types of constant pain medication used include:

Therapy. Therapy can be aimed at both the mind and the body. Says Scheman, "I try to look at any of these therapies as not human being purely physical or purely psychological — we are always a blend of both of folks things."

·         Physical treatment  is a very important part of any pain managing program. Pain can be worsen by work out that isn't done properly (or interpreted incorrectly as pain rather than overuse), and a physical counselor can tailor the right exercise regime for you. Proper exercise slowly builds your tolerance and reduce your pain — you won’t end up elaboration it and giving up because it hurts.

·         Cognitive-behavioral therapy allows people to "learn and have a better accepting of what the pain is from, and what they can do about it," says Scheman. This healing is really about understanding the role of pain in your life and what it actually means for you, add Scheman.

Other pain management options. A variety of approach and modalities can help you deal with both the corporal and moving parts of pain:

·         TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve incentive) analysis

·         consideration

·         rest techniques