Ouch! The knife has slipped, here is your index finger cut. The sharp pain that accompanies this incident quickly evaporates. “We talk about chronic pain when the pain lasts more than three months despite the treatments”, explains Pr Alain Serrie, head of the pain medicine department, at the Lariboisière hospital (Paris) and coordinator of the book. Pain medicine for the practitioner (ed. Elsevier-Masson).
Pain affects 1 in 3 people
In France, this chronic pain poisons the life of one in three adults. Whether it comes from repeated migraines, stubborn low back pain, postoperative pain, inflammatory rheumatism or many other causes, this companion is always undesirable.
Dazzling, episodic or continuous, unpleasant, disturbing, invasive or unbearable, the pain is multiple. She is said “inflammatory“when it is caused by tissue damage, following an infection or joint pain (such as rheumatoid arthritis). It is said to be “neuropathic” when the nervous system – nerves, brain, spinal cord – is damaged (for example, after surgery, due to shingles or multiple sclerosis).
In some cases, such as fibromyalgia, no lesion, neither inflammatory nor neurological, is identified: we then speak of pain “dysfunctional”.
Medicines are not automatic
It has long been considered inevitable. We had to “deal with”. But today, pain is finally taken seriously by the medical world. To calm her down, paracetamol, aspirin, morphine, even antidepressants and antiepileptics: the medicine cabinet is full.
But while drugs are often essential, they sometimes fail to fulfill their mission. Not to mention their side effects, even more so in the long term. “In pain centers, we receive failed patients. They have tried many different things, nothing has worked”, notes Professor Serrie.
“After checking what they take, when…we offer them new leads.” Beyond medication, gentle methods have proven their effectiveness. “They sometimes make it possible to take fewer tablets, therefore to have fewer side effects.”
Above all, they often offer patients in distress a quality of life that they no longer hoped for. Focus on gentle methods to treat pain in this slideshow.
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