Chronic or persistent pains are common problems. As with all pains, they can vary in intensity from mild that don’t interfere with your lifestyle, to pains that cause significant disruption to daily life. Often these pains are not “logical” in the sense of how we imagine pain should be. It is easy to understand acute pain such as putting your hand on a sharp needle, feeling the pain and instinctively moving your hand away to move away from the pain.

Chronic pain is different and is not necessarily warning your body about immediate danger. Chronic pain is complicated. In these cases the body has become oversensitised, called “central sensitisation”. Sometimes the pain is amplified compared to the reason for the pain, sometimes hot,cold or light touch brings pains. Some people feel nausea or dizziness with the pains.

The good news is chronic pain is better understood than it used to be and can be helped by physiotherapists with an interest in chronic pain. There are some useful websites such as  BodyinMind.org and noigroup.com. Our website has a useful video which explains chronic pain in an easy to understand manner.This is found in useful links.  Mindfulness meditiation has also been shown to be useful.

Published in “The Village Observer”  April, 2013,  written by Burns Bay Physiotherapy.