Pain and pain treatment

Pain is the body's warning system; the brain interprets pain signals as an alarm that warns that something is wrong. In this way, the pain is useful and a partner that can prevent greater damage.

Acute and prolonged pain

• Acute pain. In case of acute injuries, the tissue heals naturally within a few weeks. The pain also usually subsides gradually over a few days or weeks and almost always within 3 months.

• In case of long-term pain, this system does not work as it should. Even if the injury has healed, touch or other normal sensory experiences in the tissue may feel painful. In this way, pain signals are sent through the nervous system and up into the brain, even if the damage has long since healed. The brain misinterprets the signals as alarm signals without any further damage to the tissue. That's when we talk about long-term (formerly often called chronic) pain. Such pain can also occur without damage due to various long-term loads or other stressful factors such as stress and tension over time. This may be especially true for long-term back or neck pain.

Factors that may be associated with prolonged pain experience

There are many different factors that can contribute to the pain not diminishing and being prolonged. In principle, it applies to all thoughts, feelings and expectations that affect our brain. Research particularly points to challenges in important areas of life such as work, family, finances and social conditions. Sleep problems and ongoing stress can give us difficult, negative thoughts and feelings with stress, restlessness, anxiety, worries and depression. This stresses the brain.

What can you do about this yourself?

There is a lot of good advice for self-help developed by the health authorities and the pain research network. You can actually do something about many of the factors we mentioned in the previous section. The Norwegian pain network's link below refers to 17 different ways to influence pain experience. Some are particularly well-suited for self-effort. This applies, for example, to poor physical condition, sleep problems and alternatives to painkillers. See separate articles on this website. For other areas, most of us need guidance or support for change.

If you want to learn more about this topic or see which areas you can work on yourself, either go to the link to the pain center network or you can use the slightly simpler page of Norwegian Health Information Technology (NHI).