Despite the fact that many people have experienced pain, there has been a long-standing lack of awareness of the importance of pain and its harmful effects. Regarding the understanding of pain, there are great misconceptions in real life.
Myth 1: “Pain is a symptom, not a disease, and it will not hurt naturally when the disease is cured”
In the long process of medical development, the understanding of many diseases has been gradually deepened. Many diseases were first treated as symptoms and did not receive due attention and treatment, and only with the deepening of research were they recognized as diseases, thus improving the level of treatment for these diseases.
The distinction between symptoms and diseases is relative, and a chronic clinical symptom should be recognized as a disease when it seriously threatens the patient’s quality of life and ability to work for a long period of time, or even leads to suicide. For example, in primary trigeminal neuralgia, patients have no other manifestations than pain, and most of them are in pain, and their quality of life and work ability are significantly reduced, therefore, primary trigeminal neuralgia should be a typical painful disease. This disease has only pain, and when the pain is eliminated, the disease is cured.
For example, postherpetic neuralgia is also a painful disease. The disease is the result of herpes zoster virus damage to nerves, and the pain is severe and stubborn, some patients last for decades, and patient suicides occur.
Other typical painful diseases include phantom limb pain and stump neuralgia after amputation, post-traumatic injury neuropathic pain, post-paraplegic neuralgia, post-stroke neuralgia, central neuralgia, thrombo-occlusive vasculitis, migraine, myotonic headache, cervicogenic headache, dysmenorrhea, discogenic pain, chronic low back pain, and so on. These pain disorders have long been described as diseases in clinical textbooks of various disciplines. However, some doctors still think that “all pain is a clinical symptom of disease, and the pain will be gone when the disease is cured” and do not give due attention to it.
Some pain is indeed a clinical symptom of certain diseases, for example, headache secondary to hypertension, headache in case of cold, abdominal pain in case of acute abdomen, surgical incision pain, labor pain, etc., which should not be treated as painful diseases. However, the presence of these symptomatic pains should not be used to deny painful diseases. In clinical practice, it should be noted that sometimes mild pain is an early manifestation of painful diseases, which can also develop into serious chronic painful diseases if not treated properly. For example, neuralgia caused by intercostal nerve injury after open-heart surgery can develop into severe neurogenic pain if not treated promptly and early. In clinical work, it is important to clarify which pains are symptoms and which pains are painful diseases.
Myth 2: “Put up with back pain, it can’t be cured anyway”
Yesterday afternoon, a patient came to the pain department accompanied by his family, has been back pain for more than twenty years
He believes that this is not a disease at all, it is under the pressure of his family he came to see a doctor. In reality, it is not uncommon for patients to suffer from chronic pain for a long period of time, resulting in a plethora of illnesses and even lightness of life. It is a very old-fashioned and harmful misconception that “it is not necessary to treat it if you can tolerate it”. Timely diagnosis and treatment of pain and effective pain control is an important part of life’s health. The development of science has led to an increasing number of pain treatment methods, from simple medication and nerve block to multidisciplinary and comprehensive treatment.
After the standardized treatment by pain treatment specialists, it can be considered that 95% of chronic pain can be treated satisfactorily.
With the development of economy and improvement of living standard, it is the best policy to take an active treatment attitude when there is pain, and delaying the treatment often makes the acute pain turn into chronic pain. Recent neurobiological studies have shown that the long-term presence of painful stimuli can directly damage the nervous system, forming chronic neurogenic pain, which is the main pathogenesis of chronic painful diseases.
Myth 3: “Pain medicine only ‘treats’ pain, but delays the condition”
Under the guidance of modern pain theory, the pain diagnosis and treatment specialty has carried out a new mode of comprehensive analysis and judgment and treatment of painful diseases and difficult pain problems encountered in clinical medicine, so that many painful diseases that are difficult to control have been treated perfectly. For example, when faced with a patient with trigeminal neuralgia, in addition to an exhaustive history and clinical presentation, the superficial sensory and muscle strength changes of the face are carefully examined in order to exclude secondary trigeminal neuralgia. Trigeminal sensory and motor conduction velocities, electromyography, and evoked potentials will also be examined to assess the electrophysiological function of the trigeminal nerve. Before confirming primary trigeminal neuralgia, MRI is required to check for vascular or tumor compression around the trigeminal nerve root.
For common chronic painful diseases such as head and facial pain, cervical spondylosis, frozen shoulder, intervertebral disc lesions, low back and lower extremity pain, nerve block, nerve stimulation, drugs and other comprehensive therapies can effectively improve the local blood circulation disorder of pain, remove inflammatory metabolites and interrupt the vicious cycle of pain, so as to achieve the effect of “treating both the symptoms and the root cause “The analgesic effect can be achieved by removing the metabolic products of inflammation and interrupting the pain cycle.
For herpes zoster and its post-neuralgia, trigeminal neuralgia, phantom limb pain, burning pain and other intractable neurogenic pain, we have achieved satisfactory pain treatment effects by blocking nociceptive conduction pathways, improving nerve nutritional status and adjusting nerve conduction functions through the application of specific nerve block techniques and nerve frequency (thermal) electrical modulation stimulation. For cancer pain, the latest foreign cancer pain control methods are applied in combination with the patient’s physical condition and pain site, and the pain-conducting nerves are highly selectively blocked or destroyed, which can achieve more perfect medium- and long-term analgesic effects in one treatment.
Myth 4: “It is not good to use hormones when treating pain”
In the treatment of some aseptic inflammatory diseases, it is sometimes necessary to use small doses of hormone components, but the dosage form used for pain treatment is a mixed suspension, with local action as the main focus, and is strictly controlled in terms of dosage, without any systemic effects for normal people, which is completely different from the systemic (oral, intramuscular or intravenous) application of large doses.
Myth 5: “Pain medicine is to play closed”
Closed therapy originated in the former Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, also known as procaine closed therapy, is the injection of procaine into localized painful sites in the body to block the transmission of abnormal stimuli from the lesion to the brain. Many non-pain management specialists and even some nursing staff, lacking systematic knowledge and training, are keen to inject multiple drugs into painful points, acupuncture points or nerve endings to relieve pain, which they call themselves “closed therapy”. Although it can sometimes relieve the pain of some patients, many complications and medical disputes have occurred, causing some patients and some medical personnel to misunderstand and even fear the formal “nerve block”. The treatment of pain department is characterized by nerve block and interventional therapy, and adopts a comprehensive treatment method to eliminate pain quickly and completely and improve patients’ quality of life.