Have you ever had an episode of pain that just wouldn’t go away? Kept you awake all night and made you fatigued, irritable and unable to function properly? If the answer is yes (and for most people it will be) then you can have an understanding of what it must be like to live with chronic pain (e.g pain that doesn’t go away and remains a problem). In this article I thought we could look briefly at what chronic pain is, how it affects people, how physiotherapy can help and some of our experiences of helping patients with chronic pain.

As alluded to above: “chronic” pain is pain that persists longer than 3 months or after healing should have been expected to be complete. It sometimes affects one particular body part e.g, hand after an injury and is often called complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) or it might affect the whole body (and may be diagnosed as Fibromyalgia) it can also affect other body areas most commonly the low back. Chronic pain is often a very complex issue with many causes, some physiological and others psychological and social. A brief look at some statistics may highlight why chronic pain is such a problem: roughly 1.6 million people a year are affected by chronic pain and almost 8 million people live with chronic pain. There are about 4 ½ million GP appointments every year due to chronic pain and about £500 million is spent on prescriptions each year. These are staggering figures and shows how large the problem of chronic pain really is.

Research shows that physiotherapy can help patients with chronic pain and that manual therapy and acupuncture can help give patients with chronic pain some temporary relief. Physiotherapy can hep patients with chronic pain make changes to their lifestyles, choose the best exercises to help with their pain and also help them get back to work.

Our experience here at ThreeSpires Physiotherapy is that chronic pain is very complex and is a difficult to treat issue that usually takes a long time to help patients get through. Certainly manual therapy and sometimes acupuncture have helped our patients with chronic pain but it generally takes perseverance with exercises and lifestyle changes to make significant long term differences to pain levels.

For anyone reading: we are a home visit physiotherapy service, based in Lichfield but serving anywhere within a 20 minute drive including areas such as Sutton Coldfield, Tamworth, Cannock, Burton and Rugeley. We offer a wide range of services including paediatric physiotherapy, post-operative rehabilitation, neurological physiotherapy and neck and back pain relief. If you need further information or would like to book an appointment we can be contacted on 0788 428 1623 or via enquiries@threespiresphysiotherapy.co.uk