When you get injured or have surgery, you expect to hurt for a while, but you know that in time, you'll heal and the pain will leave. If you have a medical condition — from arthritis to heart disease to shingles — you recognize discomfort as a symptom and trust that treatment will help. While you wait for your body to mend, pain medication provides relief.
Chronic pain is different. Sometimes, it's an aftereffect of an injury that appears to have healed. Sometimes, it's a lingering symptom of a past illness. And in some cases, chronic pain develops out of the blue, with no link to trauma or disease. However you try to explain it, chronic pain is something of a mystery. Tests and examinations may uncover nothing abnormal, but your body's distress is real.
Over time, physical pain takes an emotional toll, making your body hurt even more. Anxiety magnifies unpleasant sensations, and sleep problems leave you feeling weak and helpless.
Persistence, poor response to treatment, unknown cause, sleep disruption and emotional fallout — these are the hallmarks of chronic pain. And the longer you've had it, the less likely it will be to disappear, whatever you do. But chronic pain doesn't have to rule your life. Here's how to take control.
Find the right care
If you've been going from doctor to doctor, now's the time to settle on one and build a good relationship. The right doctor could be a family physician or a specialist with expertise in your underlying condition — for instance, a rheumatologist if you're dealing with arthritis or a physical medicine expert (physiatrist) if you have back pain.
Or you may want to work with a pain management specialist. If you have a primary doctor, he or she may be able to refer you to one. Otherwise, major hospitals and multispecialty group practices are likely to have pain management specialists on staff. If a hospital has a pain clinic, you can find a pain specialist there. If not, check with the hospital departments that may have a pain management component — physical medicine, anesthesiology and psychiatry.
