The Mayo Clinic Guide to Pain Relief by Wesley P. GIlliam, Ph.D., and Bruce Sutor M.D explains how pain develops, how it can become chronic, and what you can do to free yourself from chronic pain’s effects.
Many families who have teens with chronic pain have gone through extensive searches for the cause of their teen’s pain. They may have seen multiple doctors, therapists and other specialists and endured a range of tests and evaluations.
As a parent of a teen with chronic pain, you may have had experiences with medical professionals who seemed as if they didn’t listen to your concerns, or who may have implied that chronic pain is not a real health issue.
Chronic pain is real. What’s important to know is that even if a cause or a cure is never found, the pain can be managed so that you, your teen and your family can still have a life despite the pain.
Find care you can trust
Whether you’re pursuing a diagnosis for your teen’s pain or have already arrived at one — even if the cause is unexplained — it’s vital that you and your teen have a relationship with a healthcare professional, or team of professionals, you can trust.
Preferably, this is a doctor, nurse practitioner or other healthcare professional experienced in helping teens with chronic pain.
At a minimum this should be a person who:
- Knows your teen’s history.
- Is willing to help you find ways to improve your teen’s quality of life, including referrals to other specialists, such as psychologists, counselors and physical or occupational therapists.
- Can help your family develop a chronic pain management plan.
- Is attentive to your teen’s whole health, including evaluating and treating conditions that are unrelated to chronic pain but otherwise might be overlooked.
Having a healthcare professional who you feel is an ally and a partner in overseeing your teen’s health can help ease some of the stress of worrying about your teen’s condition. A caring and thoughtful healthcare team also can help allay fears that you’re missing something important or that you’re not doing enough.
Once you find a healthcare professional who you feel is competent and has your teen’s best interest at heart, commit to your partnership. Hopping around from one healthcare professional to another can make it difficult to build a long-term relationship that has the qualities listed above.
Give medications as prescribed
When used appropriately, medications are useful. For some people and in certain situations, they can help reduce pain with limited side effects. Pain relievers may be used to control pain that’s more intense than usual. In addition, medications often can effectively treat other conditions that may accompany chronic pain, such as depression or anxiety.
In general, though, medications can’t cure chronic pain and they shouldn’t be viewed as the answer to pain. Among other things, long-term use of medications can create its own set of problems, including increased pain. Overuse of pain relievers to treat headaches, for example, can lead to further headaches. With certain medications, there’s also the risk of abuse.
For most teens, doing everyday activities like exercising, eating well, using relaxation and other mind-body therapies, following a daily routine and going to school will do more to help beat chronic pain than a daily dose of medication.
Know when to move beyond evaluation
When a teen experiences unexplained pain, the family can spend months or even years pursuing a diagnosis to try to understand why the pain is happening. Many families also spend a lot of time trying different treatments in the hopes of eliminating pain. Over time, this prolonged evaluation phase can reach a point where it becomes counterproductive or even harmful.
This is not the family’s fault. The medical approach to pain is to diagnose where the pain is coming from and treat the cause. The expectation is that symptoms will go away and the person’s ability to function will be back to what it was before the pain began.
But diagnosis and treatment aren’t always this straightforward. And this approach rarely works with chronic pain. Once pain has persisted beyond three to six months — which is the typical amount of time needed for tissue to heal — the problem has become chronic. Often, the result is that families spend an excessive amount of time pursuing the “fix” at the expense of quality of life.
Once pain has become chronic, it’s important for families and their healthcare teams to consider treatments that promote better function, not just symptom relief.
What experts at Mayo Clinic’s Pain Rehabilitation Center have found is that as a person’s functioning improves, even in the context of ongoing pain, the severity of symptoms begins to decrease. The general medical model is to make symptoms go away and then functioning returns. By contrast, the pain rehabilitation model is to enhance functioning first and then symptom relief tends to follow.
How do you know when to stop looking for a diagnosis or trying different pain treatments?
A lot depends on when your teen, your family and your healthcare team feel objectives.
Some families realize quickly that the strategies they’ve tried aren’t working and pivot instead to rehabilitative approaches. Others need more time to work through the treatment aimed at symptom relief before they are ready to make the conceptual shift to rehabilitation. Others remain convinced that a medical solution will present itself to eliminate all pain.
The good news is that as soon as you realize that your teen’s pain is chronic, you can start moving forward. When parents approach a teen’s chronic pain with the goal of keeping the teen’s life as normal and productive as possible, everyone — teen, parents and the entire family — benefits. Teens, and their parents, report decreased pain and less interference with daily activities.
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