Acute (New) Pain

Understanding Acute Pain: A Four-Stage Process

Stage 1, Harm: Injury occurs, and your body's harm receptors alert the brain to assess the damage.

Stage 2, Alarm: Pain serves as an alarm, a loud signal to highlight an issue and prompt action to prevent further harm. The Brain assesses all aspects of the danger it perceives and decides what level of alert is needed for you to take action, it is designed specifically for you and your circumstances to get the safest outcome. Your perception of pain is individual based on much more than physical damage and cannot be compared with anyone else's. 

Stage 3, Action: The necessary steps become clear to lessen or avoid damage and this action taken which leads to full healing. This occurs within 12 weeks for most body parts.

Stage 4, Reset: As healing progresses, the alarm’s intensity diminishes, eventually the pain goes as safety is restored, even before healing is complete. This reset allows the brain to silence outdated pain signals.

Chronic (Old) Pain

Chronic Pain: is Pain Stuck in the Alarm Phase (Stage 2)

Chronic pain is essentially acute pain that has continued after 12 weeks, and is stuck at the second stage (so is now called chronic, meaning long lasting). It puzzles medical experts and even pain researchers who tend to search for complex explanations, that rarely include trying to find out why the Brain has continued an alarm message beyond its apparent usefulness. Therefore the origin of chronic pain remains difficult to find and patients typically encounter one of two scenarios:

Acceptance: They are informed that the pain is permanent and pain management is the only option.

Endless Search: Continuous testing and procedures lead to diminishing hope and growing anxiety as no solution is found, hope is lost and sense of danger increases.

Ultimately, without appropriate actions leading to safety, the brain never perceives an environment secure enough to trigger the reset phase, leaving the individual's brain trapped in a perpetual state of alert, and that does more harm than good.

We understand that chronic pain is the brain’s way of protecting you. Staying in pain can make it difficult to detect new threats that might otherwise go unnoticed, so keeping the pain really isn't a good protective system. Our role is to recognize outdated pain patterns and programs your brain is running automatically, helping you become aware of them. Once you are aware of the true intent behind the pain alarm message you can then make choices of action that can satisfy the brain of the the current level of safety and that the danger alert is no longer needed.

When we discuss your pain with you, we are not only finding out why the pain is stuck, we are having the brain reconsider the usefulness of the pain message. The brain's perception of the overall need for pain is the key to pain removal and if we together provide enough persuasion that it is doing more harm than good, then it has to chose the new safest option, instead of sticking with a plan that was not working. When we achieve that outcome what follows is the natural way of pain ending: Action followed by Reset = Pain Goes.