26 Jul Why a Pain Doctor Could Be Your Best Friend
Some 20 years ago, pain medicine was not the recognized specialty it’s today. Patients suffering with chronic pain or debilitating acute pain would see their GPs or family doctors. As trained internists, those doctors did one of the best they might with the knowledge that they had. Today though, we all know lots more about pain than we knew up to now. A lot in order that a great pain doctor could actually be your best friend – at the very least within the medical field.
Treating pain is difficult on multiple levels. Right from the beginning, pain generally is just not a condition in and of itself. It’s a signal that something is incorrect. Still, we want to categorise pain as specific and nonspecific. Specific pain is pain for which we will discover the cause. Nonspecific pain stays a mystery. We all know a patient is suffering with it, but we don’t know what’s causing it.
Common Back Pain
Back pain is probably the most commonly reported pain doctors hear about. Prior to pain medicine becoming a specialty, it wasn’t unusual for back pain to be diagnosed as a symptom of certainly one of two problems: degenerative disc disease and disc herniation. Neither diagnosis was necessarily a nasty guess, but we all know so rather more about back pain lately.
Degenerative disk disease still does account for loads of lower back pain. Herniated disks still occur. But there are other things capable of manufacturing debilitating back pain:
The more we’ve learned about back pain, the higher we’ve gotten at developing effective treatments. That is basically what makes the difference between a pain specialist and an internist. An internist must know basic details about loads of diseases, injuries, and maladies. But pain doctors can focus all their attention on pain causes and coverings.
Opioids Aren’t the Only Game in Town
Because pain doctors have more specialized knowledge in pain and its treatments, we’re also more accustomed to treatment options that don’t involve opioids. Now, don’t misunderstand. Opioids are FDA-approved medications for treating pain. But they are usually not the one game on the town. We might submit that there are many other ways to treat pain without having to go the opioid route.
We wouldn’t expect an internist to be fully versed in such treatments. We might not even expect an internist to know how the treatments work. That’s why pain medicine now exists as a medical specialty. Pain medicine exists because we now know so rather more about pain and find out how to treat it.
Don’t Just Live with It
We are saying all of this to encourage you to not only live along with your pain. When you suffer from chronic pain, we understand that it affects nearly every aspect of your life. It probably puts a damper in your social activity. It probably leaves you feeling badly about yourself infrequently. Pain might even limit your every day functioning to the purpose that you simply don’t feel such as you’re leading normal life.
We cannot promise you 100% pain relief in only one treatment. No doctor can. But we will promise to work with you to uncover the basis causes of your pain and find probably the most appropriate treatment. We are able to promise to enable you lead as normal and productive a life as possible. You deserve that much.
Count yourself lucky. A couple of many years ago, pain medicine wasn’t the specialty it’s today. But now that pain medicine is accessible, your probabilities of finding relief are a lot greater.
