Acute vs Chronic Pain

Many life events, like stubbing your toe, or banging your elbow, or burning your hand, cause sudden pain. It is easy to recognise the source of the pain and his leads to sudden emotions together with behaviour designed to stop or withdraw from the cause of pain. This is the common experience of acute pain.

Acute pain is protective because it usually prevents further harm. Common analgesics are designed to help with this type of pain. The emotional and psychological aspects of acute pain, on the other hand, relate to how threatening or damaging the person thinks the cause may be. For example, the reaction to a severe ankle pain is quite different from a mild or moderate chest pain; a football player may continue to play despite a fracture, whilst a stressed person may leave work because of a headache.

Chronic pain can in some cases be due to ongoing tissue damage (for example due to a chronic infection) but more often is due to changes that occur in the nervous system that continue to produce pain despite a reduction or even complete healing of tissue damage. It is now understood that in chronic pain changes have occurred in the way the nervous system transmits messages, and that this may result in increased pain even after significant healing has occurred.

For this reason chronic pain does not respond well to typical analgesics and is resistant to most traditional therapies for pain.

It is important to recognize that chronic pain is not protective because it is not warning the person of the risk of further damage. Experience has shown that approaching chronic pain as if it were acute pain is almost always unsuccessful.