What is chronic pain?
Chronic pain is long-term pain that you can experience without any identifiable cause.
Pain is normally a useful and important tool that your nervous system uses to prevent you from injuring yourself. The purpose of sudden pain is to encourage your body to remove itself from whatever harmful situation or condition is causing it harm, protecting your body from injury.
Chronic pain, however, happens in the absence of a particular pain stimulus. When you suffer from chronic pain, your body continues to send pain signals to your brain even if there’s no injury or threat. This can impair your endurance, strength, flexibility, and mobility and make it incredibly difficult to function properly.
What are the symptoms of chronic pain?
There many ways that chronic pain manifests. For some people, it’s persistent headaches, while for others, it’s a pain that radiates elsewhere in their body, like their lower back or joints.
Some of the symptoms that can accompany chronic pain include:
- Irritability
- Depression and anxiety
- Lack of interest in sex
- Fatigue
As you can see, chronic pain can affect more than your musculoskeletal system and can have a profound effect on your mood, emotions, and psychology.
What causes chronic pain?
In many cases, it’s unclear what exactly causes chronic pain. It usually starts with an injury, and some people think that the root of chronic pain is nerve damage that isn’t treated after an injury has healed.
Some people develop chronic pain without an instigating injury, however. In these cases, the chronic pain might be tied to an underlying health condition, like:
- Inflammatory bowel disease
- Interstitial cystitis
- Endometriosis
- Vulvodynia
- Temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ)
Whatever the cause, chronic pain can be a severe and debilitating condition.
How do you address chronic pain?
The team at Rainier Family Physical Therapy, PS, offers a variety of rehabilitation services, but they specialize in a manual manipulation therapy called Counterstrain. The goal of Counterstrain is to identify and treat your tender points.
Tender points are areas of your musculoskeletal system that are stuck in a state of tension. They get stuck in this state as an overprotective response to a perceived threat, like an injury to your body or a diet that’s high in inflammatory foods.
Your physical therapist uses their hands to gently release these points of tension, which relaxes the spasming muscles and alleviates your pain.
Schedule your visit with Rainier Family Physical Therapy, PS, by phone or online and start treating your chronic pain today.
