Pain Flashcards
What is acute pain?
-Refers to pain of recent onset
-Serves a useful protective function
to warn of danger or injury.
What is chronic pain?
- Refers to pain which has persisted past the normal time of healing.
- Associated with hypersensitive NS an no longer warns of damage
What is pain important to learn about?
- Common symptom reported by patients
- Is complex thus pain management is complex
How do OTs address pain with clients?
- Enable individuals with chronic pain to participate in the activities that have value and meaning to them.
- Activity management: activity analysis, skill development, activity adaptation, problem solving, prioritising planning, pacing activities
- Education, coping skills training, relaxation training, stress management, ergonomics, environmental modification
What is pain?
An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage.
-Pain doesn’t always mean tissue damage
What are features of the mature organisms model?
Circular model. Input -Environment -Tissues Scrutinise -Thoughts -Beliefs -Past experiences Output -Pain -Behaviour -Change
Many people believe pain is a marker of actual or potential injury. Explain why such beliefs are reasonable? Consider the implications of such beliefs for a person with chronic pain?
- Pain is always real
- High pain=sustantial tissue damage
- Cycle of finding source of problem. May overuse painkillers/diagnostic tests. These tests can be very expensive.
What is the term nociception?
Detect real or possible injury
- Sensory information that detects real or potential tissue damage,
- Communicate with brain
- Body tells us state of tissues
- “Danger sensors”
What are the implications of a biomedical ‘input-based’ understanding of pain for health professionals treating people in pain?
- Constantly searching for peripheral problems
- Delays treatments we know might work if focusing too much on interventions for tissue damage
- Involves a search for a cause
- Focuses on the disease process, very narrow in patient treatments
- Limited collaboration between client and practitioner in decision making.
Describe the complexity of pain
- Pain is complex but necessary
- Need to learn what is harmful to themselves
- Some lack ability to sense that they are uncomfortable
- Some might put themselves in danger as body cannot protect
Why might your brain have decided to not make pain at the time of injury?
What may have happened if your brain had of used pain to protect you at that moment?
- Danger vs safety: Distracted and other things happening around you.
- Embarrassment- want to move out of judgement from others
Often the brain produces pain later, even the next day. Why do you think the brain would decide to make pain later?
- Adrenaline becomes a potent blocker to pain
- Experience a shock response
- Past experiences becomes a contextual factor
- Embarrassment and getting to safety
How does phantom limb pain address complexities of pain?
- Describe pain they feel in non-existent limb
- Highlights that pain and tissue damage are 2 separate things
What is hyperalgesia?
Increased sensitivity to feeling pain and an extreme response to pain.
“Normally hurts but hurts a bit more.”
What is primary hyperalgesia?
Results from direct effects of injury to skin and nerve tissue
- Relates to peripheral sensitisation
- Has lower threshold and takes less stimulus to deliver an action potential at a faster rate.
- Responds quicker to pain.
- Becoming more sensitive to stimuli. In response to inflammation in tissues, nerves adapt to become more sensitive.
