Understanding Pain

Most pains emerge with diseases. The purpose of medical treatment aims to cure disease in an attempt to relief pain after eliminating the cause of disease.

In fact, the pain caused by some diseases is avoidable (e.g.: the surgery or labor combined pain). Some pains continue to exist after the recovery from disease (e.g.: postherpetic neuralgia,chronic complex region pain syndromes, and back surgery syndrome).

Some pains appear without patterns and could be quite exhausting (e.g.:  Trigeminal neuralgia, migraine). Some pains (e.g.: myofascial pain, lower back pain, fibromyalgia) may be bearable but appear frequently that cause insomnia in patients and affect their school and work. Some pains will aggravate following the condition of disease and even until death (e.g.: pain from cancer).

In spite of difference cause of pain, the reaction and results caused by the central nervous system could be traced through certain network. Particularly once the pain becomes consistent perception, the central nervous system will often modulate harmful stimulating message accumulating over the long run through different nervous “substrate” interactions. For example, the distortion, magnification, deformation, and expansion form the theory of “neural plasticity.”

Painful perception will also combine with the body memory and experience with mixture of patient’s emotional reactions. The personality structure and subjective ingredients will eventually be exhibited through different pain conducts, which results in the different degree of pain in patients of the same disease, or the painkiller working for Patient A may not work for Patient B. Such accumulation of medical knowledge on complicated pains drive chronic pain therapy into a professional study, which requires the management by professional physicians.

Pain Therapy

These pains not only extend the therapy of orthodox treatment on case of disease triggering the pain but also emphasizes on the "early relief” and “comprehenive pain (and related symptoms) control” of pain.  To achieve this goal, physicians will use different types of medicine to dispose pain related symptoms, including discomfort, abnormal perception, discharge, or anxiety.

Interventional Therapy

Intervention therapy can be applied to pain related to some diseases for relief once the pain could not be resolved by oral medicine.

Pain physicians adopt “interventional therapy,” which utilizes injection to block the transmission of pain signals and avoid pain sequelae (i.e.: reduced sleep, depression, full-scale fatigue, and even more intense pain). For therapy, the dosage and administration time for oral analgesic can also be reduced to alleviate the side effects caused by medicine.