Читать книгу Why It Hurts - Dr. Aneesh Singla - Страница 18

Like detectives searching for clues, pain specialists study diagnostic results and perform clinical exams to solve the mystery of a patient’s pain. We ask ourselves, “Is the pain adaptive or maladaptive?” Pain is anything but simple. For one thing, we know that the mind can amplify or reduce pain. For example, anxiety about pain or depression because of pain can amplify the perception of that pain. This suggests that developing mental resilience to anxiety and depression might reduce the sensation of pain and, in fact, this has proven to be the case. In fact, simply by engaging ourselves in other activities—work, sports, reading—we occupy more of our brain’s bandwidth and measurably reduce the severity of the pain we experience.

We must be careful not to treat pain in isolation unless we’ve already looked for the underlying cause. We must remember that pain is first and foremost a symptom, an adaptive quality, and to listen to it. Our job is to search for an underlying cause in treating pain. To treat pain as an isolated entity is to risk missing a warning sign that our body is trying to send us.

It’s true that once an acute injury has healed or stabilized, the pain may become chronic. In many cases, we are treating the chronic pain as a separate entity from acute pain. But I would argue that even when pain is chronic, we can achieve success with a multi-modal strategy to manage it as well as to attack the focal source of pain.