Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional

I thought it was time for some more practical and useful posts, and a break from my opinionated ramblings. So today I am going to address the issue of pain. Pain is a common problem for CFS/ME sufferers and an even greater problem for Fibromyalgia sufferers who are more at the pain end of the CFS/ME/Fibromyalgia spectrum. Generally CFS/ME is characterised more by fatigue and Fibromyalgia more by pain.

I’ve been quite fortunate when it comes to pain. Most of my pain symptoms have mostly disappeared as time has passed. In the early days of my CFS/ME I suffered a lot more. Some of what I have to say here is personal experience, but the vast majority is knowledge from my pharmacy training.
 

The pain symptoms often found in CFS/ME include:

• Muscular pain, joint pain and severe headaches
• Painful lymph nodes (small glands of the immune system)
• Stomach pain and other problems similar to irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), such as bloating, constipation, diarrhoea and nausea
• Sore throat 

Fibromyalgia patients have additional pain, often all over their bodies and they can be extremely sensitive to pain, or feel pain from things that wouldn’t normally be painful.

Pain is an extremely difficult thing to quantify. It’s very subjective; you can never compare your pain to someone else’s. In some ways it’s not the level of pain that matters, but how you perceive it. There have been lots of interesting studies about pain, and one of the experiments that illustrates this you can try yourself (if you wish). Many studies have shown that if someone immerses their hands in ice cold water they will be able to tolerate the pain from the cold water for considerably longer if they are distracted by things such as complicated calculations, or word games, although all sorts of distractions will do the job. People tend to perceive their pain as less if they are not focussing on it.

Some people think that treating pain is a waste of time. How many times have we been told something along the lines of: ‘Pull yourself together it’s only a bit of pain’. But this attitude can be potentially damaging. Ideally pain should be treated and minimised. Pain that is left untreated for long periods of time can develop into a chronic (long term) problem. There are plenty of examples of people with broken limbs who had pain that wasn’t effectively treated. As a result, long after the bone had healed they still experienced pain. This is thought to be due to the nerves becoming so used to sending pain signals that they continue to do so long after the cause of the pain has healed. But it is an area that is not well understood. I’m not saying that if you don’t take painkillers when you have a headache it will never go away. But it is worth bearing in mind that it pays to be honest with healthcare professionals about how much pain you’re in and whether the methods used to treat your pain are working.  Although sadly some people have untreatable pain, there is no benefit to putting up with it if it can be treated.

I was going to talk about all the different medications and alternative therapies that are available to help treat pain, but I think I am going to have to do several posts on this as I’ve already written quite a lot. So next time I’ll do a breakdown of some of the medication available and how effective it’s likely to be.