Chronic Pain
Chronic Pain
What is Chronic Pain?
Chronic pain is a kind of pain that keeps coming back or lasts a long time, usually more than three to six months.
It’s different from the quick pain (acute pain) you feel when you hurt yourself or are sick, which warns you of injury and goes away after a while.
Chronic pain stays even after the injury or sickness is gone and can last for months or even longer.
Chronic Pain & Mental Health
In our experience, patients with chronic pain are more likely to have mental health difficulties including depression, anxiety, and stress.
The reality is that constant pain can make you feel very down, angry, or hopeless. And if this constant pain and restriction stops you from doing social activities, then it can make you feel lonely.
The great challenge is that chronic pain and mental health can work in tandem to add to your burden; sometimes, pain can make mental health worse, and then poor mental health can make the pain worse too. Your mental state can change how you feel pain. For example, if you are stressed or anxious, you might feel the pain more; and when you are stressed or anxious, it can be much harder to handle or treat your pain.
How we approach chronic pain
At The Pain Clinic, our holistic paradigm, our wisdom that the chronic pain experience is far more than physical, certainly far more than a diagnosis, things that we treat the patient as a whole, in line with their goals and aspirations, which in our experience, involves treatment of the physical pain, as well as the mental health burden.
Some cost‐effective simple techniques, like meditation, deep breathing, yoga, or just talking to someone, perhaps as part of a support group, are all highly effective in assisting our patients on their mental health and chronic pain journey.
Handling chronic pain well usually means taking care of both the body and the mind.