Businesswoman Suffering From Shoulder Pain While Working In Office
Defining pain is not too difficult. We have all experienced it. We will continue experiencing it until our dying days as pain is part of life. But from a medical perspective, pain is one of the most challenging symptoms to treat. Why? Because there are so many things that can cause it. Medical providers constantly have to juggle temporary pain relief with getting to its root cause and fixing it.
Medical providers generally break pain down into five categories. There can be overlap from one category to the next, but these five divisions help them to understand what they are dealing with in any given case. Are you familiar with the five types of pain? If not, here they are:
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1. Acute Pain
Acute pain is the type of pain human beings are most familiar with. Acute pain is sudden pain brought on by a sudden event. For example, stub your toe on the pool deck and you are going to experience acute pain. That pain may linger for a few minutes or persist for weeks.
Everything from burns to muscle pulls can cause acute pain. So can more serious things, like appendicitis or heart attack. The first line of defense is figuring out the cause. If it is something minor like a cut, you clean it out and put a bandage on it. If it’s abdominal pain that seems to indicate appendicitis, you drop everything and go to the ER.
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2. Chronic Pain
Chronic pain is any type of pain that persists for a long period of time. The CDC considers three months the threshold, though shorter time frames are cited by other organizations. Regardless, chronic pain is experienced either every day or on most days. Sometimes it has a known cause; other times it does not.
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3. Functional Pain
Pain that seems to have no root in an obvious injury, illness, or disease is known as functional pain. By definition, it often overlaps with chronic pain. Nonetheless, functional pain can also be acute. Approximately 15% of the adult population around the world suffers from some sort of functional pain syndrome.
Fibromyalgia pain was once considered functional pain. However, there is research that suggests the condition is the result of an overactive nervous system. If that is the case, fibromyalgia pain would be chronic rather than functional.
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4. Neuropathic Pain
Next up is neuropathic pain. It has a known cause: nerve damage. Long-term diabetics often experience neuropathic pain in their feet and hands due to nerve damage resulting from inconsistent glucose levels in the blood. Likewise, a person who suffers a slipped disc may wind up with neuropathic pain if that disc damaged a nerve.
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5. Nociceptive Pain
Nociceptive pain is similar to neuropathic pain in the sense that it is the result of some sort of physiological damage. But rather than nerves being damaged, this type of pain is the result of tissue damage. Osteoarthritis patients are a good example. They experience pain in their joints because cartilage has deteriorated or worn away. The loss of cartilage causes bones to grind on one another, resulting in nociceptive pain.
The medical professionals behind the Utahmarijuana.org website say that chronic pain is a condition that can be treated with medical cannabis. They also point out that some cases of acute pain are good candidates for cannabis treatment as well.
Every human being experiences pain. Some of us will be lucky enough to only experience acute pain. Many of us will experience multiple types of pain. That is just one of the uncomfortable realities of the human condition.
