Acute vs. Chronic Back Pain: What’s the Difference?

Pain has its own personality. It can feel sharp, dull, burning, stabbing, achy, or intermittent, only a little bit annoying or taking over your life. Pain can also be acute or chronic. And when it comes to back pain, chronic pain can be an entirely different beast.

So, what’s the difference between acute and chronic pain? In general, acute pain begins quickly, is fairly intense and tends to be short-lived. For example, an accident or fall, broken bone, or pulled muscle can trigger acute pain. If you’ve ever been brought to your knees by back pain that seemingly comes out of nowhere, that’s usually acute pain.

Chronic pain is pain that is happening over a longer time. The underlying condition for the pain may not be healing well, or in some cases, the pain persists even though the cause has resolved. For example, if you fall and hurt your back skiing, you will likely baby it for a while with rest, heat and maybe taking an anti-inflammatory for a couple of days. With the right care, it’s likely that you’ll be back on the slopes in a week or two. That’s an acute injury. However, if the fall caused substantial damage with pain that continues to get worse over several weeks and into months, you have a chronic condition.

Chronic pain is pain that lasts months and lasts longer than it normally takes for injured tissue to heal. In many cases, your health care provider may have a difficult time determining exactly what’s causing your chronic pain. In fact, chronic pain is categorized by whether or not it has an identifiable cause. Causes of chronic back pain may include disc conditions, spinal stenosis or a condition in which the vertebrae move out of place, called spondylolisthesis. However, many patients are frustrated because they have chronic pain with no clear understanding of what’s causing it.

Another kind of chronic pain is neuropathic pain, or nerve pain. Slipped discs, stenosis, arthritis and other conditions can impinge on your spinal nerves and cause pain that is often sharp, stabbing and often feels electrical in nature. It may also cause numbness, tingling and weakness in any affected limbs. The thing about nerve pain is that treating the underlying cause may relieve your pain, or it may not. Sometimes the affected nerve continues to send pain signals to your brain, even though the original damage is no longer impinging the nerve.

While acute pain tends to have a clear-cut course of healing, the sequence of chronic pain isn’t nearly so straightforward. It’s unknown why some people develop chronic pain, while others with a similar condition do not. And it’s interesting that some people with a great deal of damage to their spine feel no pain at all. What is known is that there are a number of factors beyond tissue damage that can play a role in a chronic pain condition. This includes your perception of the pain, how you think about the pain sensations you’re feeling, your emotions, whether or not you believe something serious is wrong, how much the pain affects your everyday life and the support you have from the people around you.

In addition, how you behave related to your pain, such as limping, taking pain meds, moving tentatively and showing pain in your facial expressions can also be a factor in how you actually experience the pain. This isn’t to say that your pain is all in your head or imagined—it’s very real. However, your brain perceives the pain that your nerve cells transmit to it for processing and interpretation. And if the pain is constantly on your mind, it can take up a lot of space in your life.

This is one of the reasons that acupuncture is such an effective treatment for pain conditions of all kinds, and is especially helpful in treating back pain. Scientists have found that acupuncture increases the release of certain neurotransmitters that ramp up your body’s own opioid system to fight pain. It increases the circulation of endorphins, which helps subdue pain signals and promote a feeling of calm and well-being. Acupuncture also works to reduce inflammation and increase circulation, which helps to bring more blood and healing nutrients to your area of injury. In addition, acupuncture is used to break up scar tissue, reduce adhesions and easing painful muscle spasms, which are meant to protect you from further injury, but are also a common source of debilitating back pain.

If you’re thinking about trying acupuncture for your back pain, whether to heal an acute condition or to calm chronic pain signals or both, your decision is supported by science. A number of research studies have concluded that acupuncture is an effective treatment modality for alleviating back pain, either on its own or in conjunction with other treatments. In fact, back pain, especially low back pain, is one of the most common conditions treated by acupuncture. Whether your pain is acute or chronic, acupuncture can help. If you’d like to know more about treating your pain, please contact me.

 

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