Let’s Get a Little More Specific About Chronic Pain
Most of us know the two main types of pain: acute and chronic. Acute pain is short-term (and often more intense) pain usually resulting from an injury or illness. Chronic pain is either long-term or long-term episodic, and can be caused by a number of injuries and syndromes. But “chronic pain” is more of a general term than it is a condition. There are actually 4 different types of chronic pain. Each have their own features and may require different treatments or management techniques. But depending on the condition or the damage, they may overlap or co-occur.
- Nociceptive Pain
Nociceptive pain usually results from tissue damage and is basically your nociceptors responding to injury or inflammation in deep tissue. It is a normal, biological response to bodily harm, whether that harm is short term, like a scraped knee, or long term, like a damaged spine. Nociceptive pain can be somatic (originates on the body’s surface or musculoskeletal tissues) or visceral (originates in your body cavity or internal organs).
Indeed, most of this theory is not important. 80% of the information coming to your brain from your periphery (everything not brain and spinal cord) comes from free nerve endings in your fascia. This makes nociceptive pain almost not relevant in treating chronic pain.
- Neuropathic Pain
Neuropathic pain originates from the body’s nervous system as a result of trauma or degeneration. Neuropathy is the death of nerves; neuropathic pain is the symptoms of damage that can lead to neuropathy. This pain can present in nearly any way, but is often a shooting/stabbing feeling. And nerves don’t regenerate well, so this pain tends to be chronic. This is also mostly not important. Most of the pain in your body is coming from the fascia injuries you sustained from your lifetime…starting with jumping down the steps and jumping out of the swing set.
- Inflammatory Pain
Inflammatory pain is the body’s immune system malfunctioning on a large level and causing pain. A condition like gout would be considered to cause inflammatory pain. Simply put, the body responds to something completely harmless with a pain response. Most inflammatory related pain comes from food you should not be eating. Sign up for our newsletter and download our “DO NOT EAT list.”
- Functional Pain
Functional pain has no definite or definable source. One such example is Functional Abdominal Pain Syndrome, which is chronic pain in the abdomen that has no diagnosable cause. Doctors will perform every type of image scans and blood tests possible to rule out literally anything else. FAPS is basically a syndrome name for something unknown. Most conditions labeled as a “syndrome” are unknown by conventional medicine. Fortunately, most functional abdominal pain is related to old injuries to your muscles and fascia (myofascia) and we can coach you to making this pain go away.
Treating Chronic Pain with Regenerative Medicine
Our health and wellness center treats any and all types of chronic pain with procedures that are safe, natural and can multitask. Treatments like PRP therapy or injecting stem cells for pain use your body’s own systems to restore tissue health and reduce your pain symptoms. And for cases where we cannot remedy the damage, we offer treatments like medical marijuana recommendations. As far as chronic pain management goes, a medical marijuana prescription is just as effective (if not more) than prescription and OTC painkillers but without the long-term health risks like liver scarring and organ failure. Suffering from chronic pain can be debilitating and depressing. But you have options; you just have to look for them.
