More people call out sick from work because of chronic pain than call out sick because of the common cold. Chances are you or someone you know suffers from chronic pain. Pain is a necessary part of life. It alerts us when something is wrong with our bodies. It’s normal to experience pain with an illness or injury. Normally, this pain fades as the injury heals or the sickness goes away. This is referred to as acute pain.

Pain becomes chronic when it continues after the healing time of the injury. This pain can hang on for months or even years and often causes depression in its sufferers. Chronic pain can also occur as the result of an ongoing condition, like fibromyalgia, arthritis, or cancer. Back injuries, carpal tunnel syndrome, and migraine headaches are some other examples of conditions that cause chronic pain. Some pain can result from injury to the nerves causing them send false signals to the brain. How massage affects your pain is partly dependent on its source.

If your pain is caused by a muscle injury massage can not only help ease the pain but also help speed the healing process. Acute or chronic – these are the two words that describe pain. Acute goes away easily and rarely lasts long. Chronic is its exact opposite. Chronic pain can last for six months and is expected to recur at anytime. The main cause of it is very hard to pinpoint. And it doesn’t help if doctors were more interested in addressing the pains rather than knowing what is actually causing it. As such, chronic pain relief can be elusive to patients.

But then again, there are certain medicines and therapies that are deemed effective for chronic pain. There are also a lot of medicines sold over-the-counter, which can truly help. While chronic pain is a major problem, patients do have options to treat it. Doctors normally prescribe medicines, antidepressants, and anticonvulsants, to address chronic pain. Chronic pain relief is also possible with physical therapy. Physical therapy corresponds to the low-impact exercises like swimming, walking, and stretching. If done regularly, these simple exercises can help your body a lot. It can help lower the intensity of the pain you’re going through.

However, these exercises are best performed along a trained physical therapist. Both occupational and behavioral therapies could also help. In occupational therapy, patients are thought how to pace and condition themselves when doing everyday tasks. Don’t get discouraged if you are one of the chronic pain sufferers for which a cause cannot be found. An unknown source doesn’t make the pain any less real. Fibromyalgia, for example, causes widespread pain in muscles and joints.

Yet, a person with fibromyalgia may not know the cause of the pain A healthcare provider may be able to link fibromyalgia to an injury or virus; but in other cases, a specific cause may go unidentified. Irritable bowel syndrome is another example of chronic pain for which the specific cause may not be known. Chronic pain may be related to changes in your nerve signals after a healed injury. Chronic pain may also be related to heightened pain sensitivity when your body produces lower than normal levels of painkilling endorphins. If you suffer from chronic pain do not ignore the warning signals. If you try to tough it out, the disease, illness, or injury may get worse. Left untreated, chronic pain can also mentally wear you down. Making massage therapy part of your treatment routine could help ease your pain and lessen your dependence on pain killing drugs. In the long run this will lead to less drug side effects and better health.