They found that neutrophils — a type of white blood cell that helps the body fight infection — play a key role in resolving pain. Experimentally blocking neutrophils in mice prolonged the pain up to ten times the normal duration.

Treating the pain with anti-inflammatory drugs and steroids like dexamethasone and diclofenac also produced the same result, although they were effective against pain early on. These findings are also supported by a separate analysis of , people in the United Kingdom that showed that those taking anti-inflammatory drugs to treat their pain were more likely to have pain two to ten years later, an effect not seen in people taking acetaminophen or anti-depressants.

was published in Science Translational Medicine. McGill is consistently ranked as one of the top universities, both nationally and internationally.

It is a world-renowned institution of higher learning with research activities spanning three campuses, 11 faculties, 13 professional schools, programs of study and over 39, students, including more than 10, graduate students. McGill University Fr.

Newsroom Institutional Communications. Enter your keywords. Main navigation Home For journalists For faculty and staff Experts guide About us Contact us. Findings may lead to reconsideration of how we treat acute pain.

Published: 11 May Shining light on night blindness. Can watching sports be bad for your health? Beyond the usual suspects for healthy resolutions. February 15, The foods you eat and don't can determine how well your body fights painful inflammation.

Diet and the immune system How does your diet fit into all this? Aim for variety The best dietary approach to help your immune system, and thus help reduce chronic inflammation, is to cut out the bad inflammatory foods and adopt more of the good anti-inflammatory kinds, says Dr.

Instead, aim for variety. For example, break down your regular meals like this: Half your plate should be filled with whole grains like whole-wheat bread, whole-grain pasta, and brown rice, along with healthy proteins, such as fish, poultry, beans, and nuts.

The other half should be mostly vegetables along with some fruit. Always use healthy oils like olive and canola oils instead of butter or other flavorings. Keep in mind that you have to make lasting change in order for your diet to work for you.

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Prostaglandins also help protect the stomach from stomach acid, which is why these medicines can cause irritation and bleeding in some people. Opioid medicines work in a different way. They change pain messages in the brain, which is why these medicines can be addictive.

Discuss these with your doctor or other health professional, so that you choose the safest and most effective pain relief option. Medicines for chronic pain are best taken regularly. Talk to your doctor or pharmacist if your medicines are not working or are causing problems, such as side effects.

These are more likely to occur if you are taking pain medicines for a long time. It is important to use a variety of strategies to help reduce pain.

Do not rely on medicines alone. People can lower the levels of pain they feel by:. You can find a more complete list of side effects in a Consumer Medicine Information leaflet External Link.

Talk to your doctor or pharmacist before taking any pain medicine to ensure it is safe for you. Treat over-the-counter pain medicines with caution, just like any other medicines. Sometimes pain will persist and cannot be easily relieved.

Here are some suggestions for how to handle persistent pain:. This page has been produced in consultation with and approved by:. Content on this website is provided for information purposes only. Information about a therapy, service, product or treatment does not in any way endorse or support such therapy, service, product or treatment and is not intended to replace advice from your doctor or other registered health professional.

The information and materials contained on this website are not intended to constitute a comprehensive guide concerning all aspects of the therapy, product or treatment described on the website. All users are urged to always seek advice from a registered health care professional for diagnosis and answers to their medical questions and to ascertain whether the particular therapy, service, product or treatment described on the website is suitable in their circumstances.

The State of Victoria and the Department of Health shall not bear any liability for reliance by any user on the materials contained on this website. Skip to main content. Pain and pain management. Home Pain and pain management. Pain and pain management — adults. Actions for this page Listen Print. Summary Read the full fact sheet.

On this page. Types of pain Pain management strategies Causes of pain How pain affects the body Managing pain without medicines Pain medicines How pain medicines work Choosing the right pain medicine Managing your medicines effectively Side effects of pain medicines Precautions when taking pain medicines Managing pain that cannot be easily relieved Where to get help.

Types of pain There are 2 main types of pain: Acute pain — a normal response to an injury or medical condition. It starts suddenly and is usually short-lived. Chronic pain — continues beyond the time expected for healing. It generally lasts for longer than 3 months. Key pain management strategies include: pain medicines physical therapies such as heat or cold packs, massage , hydrotherapy and exercise psychological therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy , relaxation techniques and meditation mind and body techniques such as acupuncture community support groups.

Causes of pain The most common causes of pain in adults include: injury medical conditions such as cancer , arthritis and back problems surgery External Link. How pain affects the body Pain is a complex protective mechanism. Managing pain without medicines Many non-medicine treatments are available to help you manage your pain.

Some non-medicine options include: Heat or cold — use ice packs immediately after an injury to reduce swelling. Heat packs are better for relieving chronic muscle or joint injuries. Physical therapies — such as walking, stretching, strengthening or aerobic exercises may help reduce pain, keep you mobile and improve your mood.

You may need to increase your exercise very slowly to avoid over-doing it. Massage — this is another physical therapy; it is better suited to soft tissue injuries and should be avoided if the pain is in the joints. There is some evidence that suggests massage may help manage pain, but it is not recommended as a long-term therapy.

Relaxation and stress management techniques — including meditation and yoga. Cognitive behaviour therapy CBT External Link — this form of psychological therapy can help you learn to change how you think and, in turn, how you feel and behave about pain.

This is a valuable strategy for learning to self-manage chronic pain. Acupuncture — a component of traditional Chinese medicine. Acupuncture involves inserting thin needles into specific points on the skin. It aims to restore balance within the body and encourage it to heal by releasing natural pain-relieving compounds endorphins.

Some people find that acupuncture reduces the severity of their pain and enables them to maintain function.

However, scientists still don't completely understand why acute pain resolves in some patients but persists as chronic pain in others. Understanding who is at risk and why could allow clinicians to better tailor rehab and therapeutic programs and develop new drugs for acute pain.

But what is happening with those who don't? To understand this mysterious transition, Marc Parisien, a research associate at McGill and lead author of the study, Diatchenko, Allegri, and colleagues recruited 98 patients with acute low back pain and followed them for three months.

As the study progressed, the research team gathered data on the patients' transcriptional activity — the first step in how genes are expressed.

They compared these data between patients whose acute pain resolved after the three months and patients whose pain persisted at the end of the study. Counterintuitively, the patients whose pain resolved showed a spike in the activity of inflammatory genes during their acute pain stages, which the scientists tied to immune cells called neutrophils.

In the chronic pain group, the immune system didn't show these reactions and remained largely static. A similar phenomenon occurred in a second group of patients with temporomandibular disorders, which can cause long-lasting pain in the face and jaw.

As with the low back pain patients, patients whose pain resolved showed many transcriptional changes and more activity of neutrophils and inflammatory genes. To corroborate and build on their findings, Parisien's team treated mice with mild pain with various pain medications or depleted their neutrophils with an antibody.

Mice that received the anti-inflammatory steroid dexamethasone or the NSAID diclofenac showed some initial signs of pain relief, but eventually developed persistent pain in the long term.

Meanwhile, other pain-relieving drugs such as lidocaine, which isn't anti-inflammatory, relieved pain without this prolonging effect. Depleting the animals' neutrophils had a similar delaying effect and extended pain, but injecting neutrophils had the opposite result. The mice that received neutrophil injections showed no chronic pain even after receiving dexamethasone, suggesting the body depends on these immune cells to resolve acute pain.

Finally, the team examined data from people with low back pain in the UK Biobank , a large-scale medical database. They compared the trajectory of pain in people who received different pain-relieving drugs, such as NSAIDs, acetaminophen, and antidepressants.

The database study revealed that people who took NSAIDs had a 1. Furthermore, subjects who showed a higher percentage of neutrophils in their white blood cells during the acute stage of pain had a lower risk of chronic back pain later in life. When discussing their study's results, Diatchenko and Allegri both highlighted the surprising and counterintuitive nature of their findings.

Similarly, Allegri said that researchers had long thought of chronic pain as the body's overreaction to a problem that was causing acute pain.

However, he believes his team's study has unveiled the opposite: a strong inflammatory response may actually help the body resolve pain by quashing the root cause.

Regenerative medicine and other types of treatments that enhance the immune response could one day bring relief to patients, he added. The paper still carries limitations that need to be addressed with further research, the authors cautioned.

For example, the study of the patients with low back pain lacked control subjects for comparison, and the team didn't track chronic pain in the patients after the end of the three-month study. Patients are suffering with pain due to old injuries , arthritis, tissue inflammation , or other degenerative conditions of the body.

While that strategy can work for acute pain treatment in some instances, we believe this approach is not well-suited to chronic pain treatment. A painkiller road to recovery is filled with potholes.

It often becomes the source of health issues, such as the side effects of long-term use of these two types of medications. Chronic pain is defined as the prevalence of pain symptoms that persist over 12 weeks and can last for months, if not years. Most chronic pain symptoms are dull and achy of a mild to moderate intensity.

These symptoms can interfere with normal home, work, or recreational activities and bring down overall quality of life. Typically, people develop chronic pain when the body is unable to resolve the initial acute pain stage.

Chronic neck pain and back pain are just two examples. The initial injury and pain may have been disregarded or incompletely treated with self-medication and home therapy. Or it may have been treated by a practitioner who did not recognize the danger signs of poor pain recovery.

Chronic pain can be related to the joints, muscles, or damaged nerves in the spine, trunk, head, and extremities. Chronic back pain treatment and chronic neck pain treatment are especially common, but this issue can be encountered across the body and its many systems. Instead, the brain overreacts by behaving as if the body is continually being reinjured.

This is due to the fact that the injured tissues involved have physiologically changed and improperly adapted.

Whether you are suffering from chronic pain or acute pain, there are functional pain management strategies that can help. Our integrative physicians are chronic pain treatment specialists. They can help provide pain relief, decrease inflammation , and speed up the healing process.

Chronic Pain Management differs from acute care in that the goal is to first identify the causes of the symptoms rather than simply cut off the pain sensation.

This can be done with a detailed history and physical exam and a functional motion assessment of the body. Once these physical, emotional, and nutritional factors are identified, we can offer treatment for chronic pain that address the source of the symptoms. Because chronic pain often affects multiple areas of the body, it can take some time to fully feel the effects of treatment.

The key to recovery is to focus on changing the persons life quality through improving their activities of daily living as the body re-adapts properly.

Another key part of holistic pain relief is to educate the patient about the modifications of diet, emotional stress , sleep , and physical activity that must be made to allow for healing. Patients must participate in a home care plan to aid in recovery.

During periodic reevaluation sessions, your physician will ask questions to help determine the severity of your pain and how it is limiting your daily functions, in order to update your long-term treatment plan. Each treatment session typically includes a review of changes in troubling symptoms.

The goal is to help your body heal itself with a targeted mix of methods that will allow you to get back on track to reach your life goals. Chronic pain does not have to limit your life.

Our integrative pain management specialists can help you navigate the potholes on the road to recovery. Diet and Nutrition. Whole Foods Perhaps you get Holistic Therapies that Are Good for Managing Arthritis Pain. Arthritis pain decreases the quality of life of millions of Americans.

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Experiencing any sort of pain has the power to disrupt our ability to carry out even essential daily functions with