Chronic pain is pain that lasts for more than six months. Research indicates 11.2% of Americans have experienced some form of chronic pain daily for the past three months.
This pain has varying degrees. Some people only suffer from mild pain while others have excruciating pain. The pain can be continuous or episodic. It may be simply inconvenient for some while completely incapacitating for others.
Why do people feel chronic pain?
In people who suffer from chronic pain, the signals of pain remain entirely active in their nervous systems for months on end or even years. This is why they experience chronic pain. This pain, as mentioned before, can come and go, or stay permanently.
Either way, chronic pain can and does take a physical and mental toll on a person as it is not easy to deal with.
Emotional factors
Chronic pain carries its own baggage of emotional trauma which can make the pain even worse. Stress, depression, anxiety, anger, and exhaustion can all be induced due to chronic pain.
These negative feelings can harm a chronic pain patient in two ways: they enhance the substances causing the pain, and they obstruct the body’s ability to produce natural pain killers.
Thus, pain is amplified even more due to such feelings and the patient is caught in a vicious cycle of it. In fact, relentless pain can subdue the immune system so the body’s very basic defense mechanisms are compromised.
Causes of chronic pain
Chronic may be caused by an earlier injury or trauma or infection. But there are also people who have the ongoing cause of pain and no past injury or any obvious body damage.
Most people suffer from chronic pain in the form of backaches, headaches, past injuries, sinus pain, tendinitis, and pain in specific body parts such as neck, pelvis, etc. Muscle or nerve pain can also develop into chronic pain.
Poor treatment of chronic pain
So far chronic pain has had no proper form of treatment. Most patients opt for opioids and that often turns into a lifelong addiction to deal with a pain that is not being treated medically.
The health care system has yet to come up with a treatment plan that at least treats and reduces pain for chronic pain patients. A cure for this disease seems far off since most of its patients are not even receiving the proper treatment. Most of them are dismissed as addicts.
But that is no fault of the patient as insurance companies would rather that the patient is treated by pharmaceuticals and other dangerous substances rather than be treated by a pain specialist like Dr. Tom Macek and given an alternative, medically safe treatment. The psychological needs of these patients are also ignored completely.
Any research in this field is difficult as there is limited to no funding available for it. Therefore, until chronic pain research receives proper funding and its patient the right health care, this will continue to be an epidemic.
Thankfully, for those of you reading this, you have an alternative solution within this website and the products being offered.
By: Marisa Morabito