Melissa Keroack: Things You Should Know About Pain

P H Y S I C A L T H E R A P Y T I P S : T H I N G S Y O U S H O U L D K N O W A B O U T PA I N

M E L I S S A K E R O A C K :

• The most common reason people attend physical therapy is due to pain.

• As a physical therapist and as a patient, it’s important to recognize that pain is output from the brain and that often there are many factors that contribute to having pain in the body.

• Understanding pain is not an easy task, especially because we have to understand how the brain works to first comprehend where pain is coming from.

• Here are some key things you should know about pain…

• First, the degree of an injury does not always equal the degree of pain one is experiencing.

• According to an article published on MoveForwardPT.com, “Research has demonstrated that we all experience pain in individual ways. While some of us experience major injuries with little pain, others experience minor injuries with a lot of pain (think of a paper cut),” (9 Things You Should Know About Pain).

• In addition to this, there is no way of knowing if somebody has a high pain tolerance, so measuring and comparing pain tolerance among individuals is extremely difficult.

• Second, psychological factors play a large part in accentuating pain.

• Depression and anxiety has been proven to make pain worse for certain individuals.

• According to MoveForwardPT.com, “A recent study in the Journal of Pain showed that psychological variables that existed prior to a total knee replacement were related to a patient’s experience of long-term pain following the operation,” (9 Things You Should Know About Pain).

• Furthermore, one’s social environment can also influence one’s pain perception.

• In most cases, when somebody is at work or in a stressful situation, their pain increases.

• This is because the pain messages that are generated in stressful environments are rendered from the brain as unsafe, which shows our natural human instinct of self-protection.

• Lastly, diagnostic imaging may not always be accurate when determining the cause of pain.

• According to MoveForwardPT.com, “A study performed on individuals 60 years or older who had no symptoms of low back pain found that 36% had a herniated disc, 21% had spinal stenosis, and more than 90% had a degenerated or bulging disc, upon diagnostic imaging,” (9 Things You Should Know About Pain).

• For more information regarding facts you should know about pain, please read MoveForwardPT.com’s article here .