Can the pain be cured?

  Pain is an unpleasant sensation or mental experience that is accompanied by substantial or underlying tissue damage. Pain, contains both a favorable side: it is the body’s protective way of responding to its surroundings; it also contains a negative side: severe pain can trigger shock, and chronic pain can often be painful for the patient and even lead to the patient’s own risk. Therefore, analgesia is an important task for health care workers. It also requires that patients have a proper understanding of pain and have relatively reasonable expectations about the effects of pain treatment.  Before the start of pain treatment physicians try to identify the cause of the neuropathy as a guide to treatment that will help relieve symptoms. Also before proceeding with the start of any treatment, the physician and patient should discuss the goals and expectations of the treatment. It is helpful to recognize that patients may have different perceptions and understandings of the current state of treatment and that complete pain relief is rare. A clinically meaningful improvement in pain is currently defined internationally as 30%-50% pain relief, and a reduction in VSA score to below 3-4 is considered a more satisfactory treatment outcome.  By understanding this, patients have a better mindset in managing their pain, which is helpful for medication recovery and medication adherence. The treatment of chronic pain is based on medications, mostly neurological drugs, which are usually started at low doses and gradually increased over several weeks until sufficient clinical response or intolerable adverse effects are observed.  When a drug provides partial relief but higher doses produce adverse effects, a combination or multidimensional therapy may be considered. A reasonable intervention is to add a drug with a different mechanism of action or to initiate a nonpharmacologic approach, such as a study of the long-term efficacy of morphine combined with gabapentin for the treatment of chronic noncancerous neuropathic pain, which showed that the combination of the two drugs was effective in relieving pain in patients showing good tolerance and no risk of drug addiction. The targeted application of minimally invasive therapy along with drugs as the basic treatment measure is a beneficial weapon in pain medicine.  There are multiple weapons in the hands of pain physicians to treat and manage pain. They can help to relieve the pain of chronic pain in a wide range of patients. So ask, “Can my pain be cured?” . Chronic pain is a persistent disease, but it can be cured and managed by first facing the pain.