Understanding chronic pain
When it comes to pain, every single one of us has at some point in our life experienced it. From a broken bone to those annoying paper cuts. Pain is almost a daily occurrence for all of us.
For some people pain can last for a few days. Depending on the circumstance it can last weeks. If you're unlucky it can last for months and maybe years if there is no intervention.
If you’re feeling constant pain for more than 3 months, this is classed as chronic pain and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare claims 1 in 5 Australians that are over 45 can suffer chronic pain, 1 in 3 if you're over 65.
In those 3 months a lot can happen in our brain that can influence our perception of the situation. Pain can make us guard or hold muscles in the area of pain to help with avoiding more pain. In turn these muscles that hold, start to cause pain as well because they are over used when they’re normally not. This leads to a pain cycle that can be very hard to break after those 3 months have passed.
Chronic pain is a beast that we have started to understand over the past few years through pain science and our understanding becomes clearer as time goes on. In saying that, chronic pain is usually multifactorial and it’s never just one thing that is influencing what we feel.
Just because we feel pain, doesn’t always mean there is a physical issue there. That doesn’t mean that it’s 'all in your head' either. When suffering from chronic pain, the nervous system can become more sensitised over time. Generally things that shouldn’t hurt become more amplified. The brain then becomes more efficient in producing pain because it is more active and on edge.
There is a lot that can contribute to what we feel over a long period of feeling pain. Factors such as stress, anxiety and even low quality sleep can be very big factors in keeping the nervous system hyperactive.
Myotherapy can initially help with slowly changing your pain level to help with facilitating proper movement patterns. Once these patterns are established and the pain has become manageable, we implement specific exercises to strengthen those muscles and in turn you become comfortable with normal movements again. This is usually a gradual process, but slowly reducing the fear behind the pain can help significantly with moving out of chronic pain and into normality.
