Pain is an unpleasant sensation that all of us have experienced. While pain is your body’s natural response to physical harm, it can sometimes turn into a chronic and debilitating condition that can wreak havoc in your life.
Uncontrolled pain can also negatively impact your mental and emotional health. Thankfully, there are many interventions and therapies that can help reduce pain and physical discomfort caused by a variety of medical conditions and injuries.
In this article, we will explore different types of pain, how pain is evaluated, and common pain management strategies.
Different Types of Pain
Pain can come in many forms. Some types can happen as a result of an injury or disease, or return after a procedure or treatment. While many types of pain have a cause, there are others that have no known causes.
The most common types of pain are:
- Acute Pain – Sharp pain that results from a sudden injury, trauma, or illness.
- Chronic Pain – A long-standing pain that results from untreated disease or injury.
- Nociceptive Pain –A sudden short-lived or long-standing pain that occurs when nerve cells endings send pain signals to the brain after an injury.
- Neuropathic Pain – Pain that occurs due to a problem with the nervous system, e.g., damage to nerves.
Based on the severity, cause, and location of the pain, it may be described as:
- Throbbing or pounding
- Sharp or shooting
- Aching, dull, or nagging
- Stinging, pulsing, or burning
How is Pain Evaluated?
The first step in pain management is pain evaluation. To evaluate pain means to determine the cause of the pain.
Your pain management doctor will do a pain evaluation by asking you questions about your pain, like when and where you feel pain, when your pain gets better, whether the pain stays in one place or moves to other body parts, and how the pain feels.
Your pain management doctor may also give you a pain scale on which you can rate your pain from 0 to 10.
What Are Some Common Pain Management Strategies?
Based on the findings of the initial evaluation, your pain management doctor will create an interventional pain management treatment plan, which may include a wide range of treatments including the following:
Guided Joint Injections
Guided joint injections address pain in the lower back, neck, facet joint, and sacroiliac joint. Your pain management doctor will inject medications like anesthetics (to block nerves), corticosteroids (to fight inflammation), and/or hyaluronic acid into these painful joints under the guidance of images produced by X-rays and ultrasound.
These injections offer lasting pain relief but may need to be repeated.
Radiofrequency Ablation (RFA)
Radiofrequency ablations treat neck, back, and hip pain by delivering focused radio waves into the area being treated. The focused radio waves heat and destroy the nerve endings responsible for sending pain signals to the brain.
Trigger Point Injection
As their name suggests, these injections target the trigger points or tight knots in your muscles that cause radiating pain (pain elsewhere in the body). A precise dose of local anesthetics is injected into areas having tight knots.
Platelet-Rich Plasma Therapy
This is a revolutionary therapy in which your own blood components, i.e., plasma and platelets, are injected into the area under treatment. The therapy helps increase cell turnover, repairs, and can replace damaged tissues, thereby gradually lessening the pain and other symptoms associated with an injury or chronic medical condition like arthritis.
Pain Management in Melbourne, FL
Are you looking for lasting relief from your pain and discomfort? Our professional team of interventional pain management specialists at Central Florida Spine & Pain has you covered.
Our interventional pain management physician, Dr. Nicholas Giordano, has helped countless patients overcome their pain associated with injuries, surgeries, and medical conditions like arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome with drug-free and non-surgical pain treatments.
If you would like to make an appointment with Dr. Nicholas Giordano, call our staff today at (321) 802-5021 to tell them that you are coming, or you can fill out our online appointment request form.
