Chronic Pain

Chronic Pain is considered pain that lasts longer than the normal healing timeframe. Pain science is currently a hot topic in medicine and within the field of physical therapy. There has been a lot of new research related to pain science that has emerged within the last few years and we are learning more and more about how pain manifests in the human body. The first important thing to remember is that pain is an output from the brain. This is the newest and latest change in thought related to pain that has occurred in the last 5-10 years. This means that an injured area sends a signal to the brain through our nerves and the brain processes this information and sends back out a feeling of pain so you know to protect the area from further injury. When chronic pain manifests the actual original injured tissue has healed but the brain continues to send out the pain message to the body. This can be confusing to follow and understand. The example I like to give to patients is say you live in a bad neighborhood and you are worried about your car getting broken into (this when you are injured- your body is sending out the appropriate danger message). Then you move to a nice safe gated community where you no longer have to worry about your car getting broken into (this is your body when your injury has healed). But since you spent so long in the bad neighborhood worried about your car getting broken into, you are still worried this is going to happen even in the safe new neighborhood. This is chronic pain. Even though the injured tissue has healed the brain continues to send out the pain message. We are trained to treat and identify chronic pain in physical therapy using certain strategies as it is different than treatment to the actual area. Patients with chronic pain may present with hypersensitivity to touch (this is called hyperalgesia) or they may present with painful responses to stimuli that are not normally painful (this is called allodynia). Patients with chronic pain may also present with skin changes around the affected area (this called peau d'orange). In physical therapy our goal is to reduce the brain's output message of pain. We do this with different techniques that tend to produce successful results. Chronic pain is very common and we treat these patients in our clinic.  If you would like to schedule an appointment please reach out to us.