Chronic pain-special consideration and treatment

Chronic pain is one of the prominent health issues in the geriatric population and beyond. Unfortunately, chronic non-cancer pain is not sufficiently understood by the medical community, as it typically does not respond to a single medication.

The internationally accepted pain definition summons these features

• Pain is a personal, individualized experience that is influenced to varying degrees by biological, psychological, and social factors.
• Pain and nociceptive nerve stimulation are different entities. Pain cannot be solely attributed to the activity of the sensory neuron
• A person "learns" pain through their life experiences.
• When a person reports that they are in pain, this must be respected regardless of tangible evidence.
• Although pain is part of a protective mechanism in physiology, chronic pain has a negative impact on the patient's social life and mental health.
• Words are just one of the parameters for expressing pain. A person in such a situation who cannot communicate verbally does not necessarily mean they are not in pain.
• Pain is a psycho-socio-biological phenomenon that is not necessarily limited to the activity of the nerve cells that transmit nociceptive stimuli. Additionally, elements of "damage" within the body that cause such pain may not be detectable with our current technology. Therefore, a person who complains of pain should not be treated as "crazy" if the tests they undergo do not reveal a specific cause.

Patients with chronic pain have both physical and psychological components, and thus the treating physician must approach their situation accordingly. These are primarily chronically "tormented" patients who have exhausted their physical and mental reserves due to an issue that affects every aspect of their activities and directly contributes to a decline in their quality of life.

Chronic pain "distorts" the patient's perception of their overall health and hinders daily activities. The result is a person who withdraws and isolates themselves from family and friends because they cannot follow a normal lifestyle like everyone else. This, in turn, obviously increases the incidence of depression.

In the workplace, it is one of the undeniable factors contributing to reduced productivity, loss of work hours, increased sick leave, and strain on the healthcare system.

The goal of treating this type of pain is to improve functionality through techniques and methods that reduce the intensity and frequency of symptoms, thereby restoring a good quality of life

Current treatment options

Chronic pain often does not respond to medication alone. Physical therapy combined with strengthening techniques, cognitive psychotherapy, injections, surgeries, or alternative therapies may be necessary.

The medication regimen includes non-opioid analgesics: anti-inflammatories, muscle relaxants, topical patches for neuropathic pain, antidepressants, and certain types of anticonvulsants. The purpose of all these medications is to increase the patient's tolerance to pain and/or to diminish the nociceptive stimulus.

Neural therapyAn alternative view to pain and symptom management.

Η μέθοδος της Neural Therapy It represents a quite effective solution for chronic pain. Its philosophy lies in the injection of minimal amounts of local anesthetic into specific areas of the body, based on the patient's history and the clinical examination conducted by the treating physician.

In this method, we accept that chronic stress, past injuries, serious illnesses from the past, and long-lasting conditions "overload" the nervous system and cause it to react excessively to the stimuli it receives

With the injections of local anesthetic, the nervous system achieves a "balance," resulting in a reduction of chronic pain, elimination of various functional disorders, and consequently an improvement in the patient's quality of life. All of this is achieved by activating the body's own regulatory mechanisms and represents the most individualized treatment apart from pharmaceutical management of symptoms and other conventional techniques currently available in the medical community.