Pain Management vs. Pain Treatment Subtle but Real Differences

26 Feb Pain Management vs. Pain Treatment Subtle but Real Differences

When you visit your GP with complaints of general aches and pains, you are likely to receive some sort of pain treatment. That’s normal. Treating pain is something your GP is expected to do. But if your doctor were to refer you to Lone Star Pain Medicine, we would be more likely to offer you pain management. The differences between pain management and pain treatment may be subtle, but they are real, nonetheless.

A Short-Term Focus

The consensus for pain treatment is that it has a short-term focus. A good way to understand it is to think of acute pain, pain that comes on suddenly and is expected to be temporary. Post-surgical pain is a good example.

An expectation that pain will only be temporary suggests that it be treated with short-term intervention or therapy. The idea is to relieve the patient’s pain until its root cause is corrected. In a post-surgical scenario, pain would gradually subside as the surgical site heals.

Common pain treatments include:

• Analgesic or anti-inflammatory medications.
• Massage, acupuncture, and other physical interventions.
• Interventional procedures, like nerve blocks and injections.

Pain that fails to respond to traditional interventions might ultimately become chronic pain. Although chronic pain is defined differently based on context, the most widely accepted definition is pain that is experienced daily or almost daily for three months or more.

Treatment Is a Long-Term Proposition

The definition of chronic pain should give you a good idea of how pain management differs from pain treatment. Where treatment is considered a short-term intervention, management is long term.

Pain management does include a treatment component. In other words, the pain medicine doctors here at Lone Star Pain Medicine do not want patients to continue living in discomfort. So they offer various treatments designed to alleviate pain. But in pain management, there is the expectation that it may not be possible to permanently alleviate a person’s pain completely.

A Multidisciplinary Approach

Pain management doctors often treat chronic pain patients with a range of prognoses. Some may eventually find relief at some point down the road while others live with pain for the rest of their lives. Such a wide variety of outcomes calls for a multidisciplinary approach.

In pain management, long term treatments involve:

• A multidisciplinary team of healthcare professionals.
• A long-term approach to improving quality of life.
• A combination of physical, psychological, and medicinal treatments.
• A heavy focus on functional improvement.

The last point cannot be emphasized strongly enough. Chronic pain often leads to a loss of function. Subsequently, a loss of function leads to a lower quality of life. People stuck in a cycle of chronic pain and poor life quality are subject to a higher risk of depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues.

Therefore, one of the main priorities of pain management is to restore as much function as possible. Pain management doctors do everything they can to help patients live normal, functional lives. The more functional chronic pain patients are, the less likely they are to feel trapped by chronic pain.

Ready to Help You

Whether you are dealing with acute or chronic pain, Lone Star doctors are ready to come alongside and help you. We invite you to make an appointment at your earliest convenience.

In the meantime, remember that there are differences between pain management and pain treatment. They may be subtle, but they are important enough to warrant seeing a pain management specialist if your GP has been unsuccessful in treating your pain. Pain management goes a step above and beyond.