When it comes to chronic pain, it is often not possible for doctors to provide adequate responses to their patients about what might be wrong and why they continue to have pain.
What’s happening to me?
The answer to this question is much less complicated for a person with acute or immediate postoperative pain who has a simple biomedical and mechanical mechanism.
This traditional biomedical diagnosis of these conditions can provide the individual with a clear explanation of “what happens to me” by labeling specific structures and tissue lesions. The treatment can be directed towards the offensive tissue or an injury with relatively good results.
Often, these people experience pain that is systemic in nature and is not directly related to a specific structure or tissue injury. When it comes to dealing with people with chronic pain, attempts to provide a reasonable response to the question “what’s wrong with me?” They have proved to be a challenge.
The assignment of these various diagnostic “labels” for conditions such as fibromyalgia (FM), chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), non-celiac gluten sensitivity, metabolic disorders, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and Chronic Lyme disease (CLD), for people with chronic pain can confuse the individual when he tries to answer the question “what’s wrong with me?” .
The traditional use of “labeling” conditions can lead to clinical practice treating a condition as a problem of an isolated tissue can be part of the poor results that are often found in the treatment of these conditions.
Several reports have shown an increase in the number of people diagnosed with these different conditions over time. This shows that more and more people are struggling to make sense of their chronic pain through these various diagnostic conditions.
For example, 20 years ago it was estimated that 6 million people in the United States suffered from FM, while updated prevalence studies place around 10 million patients in the United States in the United States, with that prevalence being more than twice as high. higher in women.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported 300,000 new cases of CLD per year in the United States, which increases the total number of people affected.
- First, it has been shown that many of these conditions have several overlapping signs and symptoms, and many people with FM may also have the SFC label attached, which complicates the person’s search for answers, much less the treatment.
- Second, for many of these diagnostic conditions, there are no definitive medical tests and, often, the diagnosis is made through a process of elimination, which adds uncertainty to people and further complicates the diagnostic process.
- Finally, adding the word “syndrome” or providing a non-descriptive label does not help people with their initial “what’s wrong” question, but it can actually generate more uncertainty.
The precise diagnosis of some medical conditions that have a specific mechanical source of disease or pathology is vital to apply the most appropriate treatment for these conditions. For patients suffering from chronic pain, the label for the condition may not add value to the selection of the appropriate treatment.
It is necessary to perform an adequate examination to rule out important medical pathologies that could be the source of chronic pain. However, once discarded, the consideration of the patient’s condition from a biopsychosocial perspective is more appropriate than the treatment toward a medical label of a condition.
According to clinical practice guidelines directed towards chronic pain conditions, patients should be educated about the nature of their disease, ensure that education is closely linked to the evidence of the biological nature of their problem and avoid “syndromes” and geography (that is, the lower back).
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