Chronic Pain

You don’t have to live with it. You can be normal again. As injuries heal, pain usually becomes less severe, but chronic pain is different. It’s not all in your head, your body is continuing to send pain signals to your brain, even if there are no longer damaged tissues. Chronic pain can last several months to several years. It limits mobility and makes it very challenging to get through daily tasks and participate in normal activities.

Common types of chronic pain include lower back pain, pelvic pain, headaches, and arthritis pain. Chronic pain affects more than 1 billion people in the world. It’s both a global and multifactorial problem.

The Difference Between Pain Tolerance and Pain Threshold

Imagine you’re taking care of a bunch of noisy children and a sleeping baby. You might think that eventually, you’ll be able to ignore the noise the children are making. However, you can’t ignore the noise in the room in case the baby wakes up. You actually become more sensitive to the noise in the room so that you’re able to hear the baby crying over all the other noise. This is what can happen with chronic pain.

Your pain threshold, the amount of stimulation it takes for a nerve to send the alarm signal to your brain, gets lower so that you can still hear the baby crying/sense danger over all the other noise/chronic pain. Your pain tolerance in this analogy is how much the noisy children bother you to begin with. Pain tolerance, or the way you interpret pain, is something you can have mental control over, but you are at the mercy of your body’s pain threshold which decreases in the presence of chronic pain.

Physical Therapy and Chronic Pain

Since chronic pain comes in many forms, it’s important that a treatment plan is personalized. Your physical therapist will do a comprehensive exam to figure out the root cause of your pain and customize a therapy plan specific to you.

At Body Gears Physical Therapy, we use many techniques and forms of treatment, including sensory re-training, joint mobilizations, gentle soft tissue manual therapy, McKenzie-based therapy, Functional Dry Needling, muscle activation and strengthening exercises, and nerve glides as well as posture and movement re-training. You will also receive a home exercise program that includes self-treatment techniques that put you in control of your symptoms.

The goal of physical therapy is not just pain relief, but making sure you can complete all of your daily activities efficiently without pain or risk of re-injury. The process of overcoming chronic pain can be long and complex but at Body Gears, we aren’t afraid of your pain.

Request Free Consult or Contact Us Today at Chicago Lincoln Park, Oak Brook, Oak Park, & Winnetka, IL Centers to learn more about how we can help you get back to the things that matter most and enjoying life without chronic pain.