What are acute pain and popular acute pain management techniques?

Acute pain is generally linked with normal health issues such as illness or injury a broken bone, laceration, or following a surgical procedure. This type of pain is temporary and often has a clear cause. Acute Pain improves with time as our body heals and often lasts less than 12 weeks. Pain lasting for more than 12 weeks is comprehended as chronic pain.

What are the symptoms and risks associated with this pain?

Pain is referred to as acute pain when:

• It does not prevail for more than a few months
• It has a specific cause such as a broken bone or post-surgery
• Pain is sudden and sharp at the point

Although it is defined that acute pain lasts for only a short period that does not mean it is always minor. The intensity of your pain can be mild or severe, depending on the cause. The chances are that symptoms may come and go, and your pain levels can increase or decrease. In some cases, it disappears in a few hours and for some, it lasts for days or weeks.

Diagnosis of acute pain

There are different ways that a doctor can diagnose your pain. One of the simplest ways is to ask you to give a rating of your pain on a scale of 1 to 10. Your doctor may also ask you several questions to collect more information about your pain and find out the best strategy for your acute pain management. Some of those questions are the following:

• Are you already consuming anything to treat your pain?
• Did your symptoms start gradually or all of a sudden?
• Do you experience another symptom like numbness or tingling, besides pain?
• Does your pain affect your daily life routine?
• how long you have had this pain?
• Is the pain constant or come and go?
• When did your pain start? What were you doing at that time?

If the reason for your pain is not diagnosed, your doctor may ask you for some additional tests to find out the actual reason for your pain.

Treatment of acute pain

The treatment for acute pain depends on several factors, including the cause of the pain and, the location and severity of the pain. For example, pain resulting from childbirth would be treated differently than pain from a sports injury.

When the pain is minor, it can be treated in a very simple way by using OTC medicines. The complex pain is treated by trained professionals in different ways as per the condition.

The acute pain management team uses a comprehensive approach to control the pain. Depending on the nature of the pain, they may incorporate one or more modern techniques like epidural catheters, IV or oral medications, including anti-inflammatories, muscle relaxants or antidepressants, and peripheral nerve blocks.

Apart from this, they also initiate some non-pharmacological acute pain management techniques to deteriorate pain. These techniques mainly include physical, cognitive-behavioral strategies, and lifestyle pain management.

Cutaneous stimulation also provides instant and effective pain relief, although it is a temporary technique. The way it works is by diverting the client’s attention away from painful sensations through tactile stimuli. These techniques include massaging the affected area interrupting the pain transmission, and heat and cold application that help in improving blood flow in the area and through reduction of pain reflexes. Other cutaneous stimulation interventions include therapeutic exercises such as yoga, low-intensity exercises, ROM exercises, acupuncture, and acupressure that help to relieve the pain in the body.

So, these are some basic techniques of acute Pain Management that professionals adopt to help you from acute pain so that you can live your life pain-free.