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What is Chronic Pain?
Everyone suffers from acute pain when injured or ill, but acute pain goes away quickly. Chronic pain is defined by experts as pain that has not gone away or recurs frequently even after six months have passed. Traditional treatment methods often fail to bring relief.
Who Does Chronic Pain Affect?
Chronic pain affects people of all ages, races, and occupations. Severe chronic pain is a devastating health problem that affects as many as one in ten Americans (more than 25 million people).
For every person seeking relief from chronic pain, others are inevitably affected: husbands and wives, parents and children, friends, employers and co-workers. Chronic pain can interfere with every aspect of a person's life: work, relationships, self-esteem, and emotional well-being.
Common types of chronic pain
The most common types of chronic pain are headaches, back pain, and arthritis pain. Other common types include neck pain, fibromyalgia/fibrosis, myofascial pain, TMJ pain, "whiplash" pain, sciatica, carpal tunnel syndrome, pelvic pain, neuropathy and neuralgia pain, and phantom limb pain.
Chronic pain can also result from illness or conditions such as osteoporosis, lupus (SLE), rheumatoid arthritis, scoliosis, endometriosis, and scleroderma. In many cases, unfortunately, the underlying cause of an individual's chronic pain is unknown.
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