Chronic Pain Relief Methods

There is no one-size-fits-all method that works for everyone. As a rule, low-risk daily maintenance adjustments should be preferred. If the effect is not good, physical intervention should be added. When the pain seriously affects your life, follow the doctor's instructions and use drugs or invasive treatments. Do not try random folk remedies or take painkillers.

During the two years when I worked as an assistant in the rehabilitation department, I saw too many patients who took detours: a 32-year-old programmer suffered from sciatica in his lumbar prolapse. He practiced "three minutes of lumbar prolapse rehabilitation exercises" with an internet celebrity blogger, which directly jammed the edema of the nerve roots even more severely, making him unable to even get out of bed in pain.； The 60-year-old aunt suffered from degenerative knee pain for more than half a year. She refused to take medicine and went to the square every day to "scratch her knees." In the end, only a thin layer of cartilage was left, so joint replacement was the only option. To be honest, chronic pain is like having a noisy little tenant living in your body. If you ignore it, it will act like a monster every day. If you just give it a sap (take random medicines and perform surgery randomly), it can easily damage the house. You have to slowly find out its temper and follow it.

Let’s start with the daily adjustments that are most easily overlooked and cost the least money. Nowadays, two factions are quarreling fiercely on the Internet. One faction says that you should lie down and recuperate when you feel pain, and the other faction says that the more painful it is, the more you need to exercise. In fact, both of them are only half right: if you are in the acute stage of inflammation, such as a recent attack of gout, or synovitis with effusion that is so swollen that you can't even put on your pants, then you must rest and rest, and don't move around to irritate the lesions. ； But as long as the acute stage is passed, even if there is still a little pain, you must move slowly. Otherwise, the muscles will fall quickly and the support will not be enough, and the pain will only recur and never get better. For example, the programmer who suffered from lumbar protrusion slumped on the bed when he was in pain. After two months of paralysis, his legs hurt when he stood up and took even two steps. Later, he adjusted to standing holding the table for 5 minutes every half hour, always placing a pillow behind his waist that conforms to the physiological curvature, and walking slowly around the neighborhood for 20 minutes after get off work. Even he did not expect that half of the pain in his buttocks disappeared after half a month. By the way, there’s another point that many people don’t pay attention to: emotions have a really big impact on pain. People who stay up late and are anxious for a long time will have a much lower pain threshold. What is originally just a faint soreness can be amplified two or three times. I have seen several patients with chronic shoulder pain. After adjusting their sleep with the doctor, the pain level was directly reduced by half.

If it still hurts after a week or two of daily adjustments, you can try physical intervention. This area is actually more controversial. Some people say that acupuncture and massage are the quintessence of China, while others say it is all an IQ tax. According to the patients I have contacted, for shoulder, neck and back pain caused by myofasciitis, if they go to a doctor in the rehabilitation department of a regular hospital for massage or acupuncture, or they can use a foam roller to roll tight muscle nodes at home, the effective rate can reach more than 70% ； But if the pain is caused by nerve entrapment, such as a herniated intervertebral disc pressing on the nerve root, or the rotator cuff has been torn, pressing blindly will only make the edema area more swollen. Before, an uncle had shoulder pain and asked his wife to rub it vigorously at home, which directly caused a rotator cuff injury and required surgery. Western medicine rehabilitation recommends shock wave and medium-frequency electrotherapy, while Chinese medicine prefers moxibustion and bone setting. In fact, there is really no need to worry about the school. As long as it is done by a regular institution, you can continue if you try it yourself. If it doesn't work, change it. Don't stick to one method and waste time. Those "magnetic therapy belts" and "pain buster patches" that cost dozens of yuan in the mail are not useless. Most of them serve as local hot compresses or psychological comfort. It doesn't hurt to use them when the pain is mild. If the pain lasts for more than three months, don't rely on these. Go to the hospital first and take a X-ray to find out whether it is a muscle problem, a bone problem or a nerve problem. This is better than anything else.

If the pain is so severe that it affects your sleep and makes daily walking difficult, don't take it hard and just take the medicine when it's time to take it. The older generation always say that "painkillers hurt the stomach and kidneys and are addictive." In fact, it is really an old idea: Nowadays, commonly used non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, such as celecoxib and etoricoxib, are taken according to the dosage according to the doctor's instructions, and if taken continuously for no more than two weeks, there is basically no dependence, and the side effects are very small. Instead, the pain is endured. Long-term pain stress is much more harmful to the body than the side effects of the drugs. Of course, you can't eat it randomly. For example, pain caused by gout should be combined with uric acid-lowering drugs, and neuropathic pain should be treated with specialized drugs such as gabapentin. Don't just stuff a piece of ibuprofen no matter what the pain is. Eating it for nothing will hurt your stomach. The "addictive painkillers" that many people are afraid of are actually controlled opioids, which are not available for ordinary chronic pain, so there is no need to worry.

Anyway, there is really no magic formula for chronic pain. I have seen people recover from back pain by practicing Tai Chi for twenty minutes a day. I have also seen people who have undergone minimally invasive surgery and still have pain occasionally on rainy days. The most important thing is not to fight the pain, and don’t completely let it go. Slowly try the method that suits you, and learn to live in peace with it. That’s enough.