Chronic pain should be differentiated from acute pain. Acute pain consists of pain from injuries, cuts, inflammations and conditions that may result from a work injury. Chronic pain lasts for much longer and can interfere with your daily functioning and activities, leaving you irritable, depressed and sleepless.

It can also lead to dependency on narcotics and pain killers or even alcohol for coping with it. Treatment for managing such pain ranges from medicines to physical therapies. There are also behavioral and psychological therapies, alternate therapies and, of course, surgery, if all else fails.

Getting the Right Treatment Plan

If you sustain an injury at work, receiving a customized treatment plan is the best way to go. This means visiting an Arizona workers comp pain doctor who understands how to treat you appropriately, so that you can get back to work as fast as possible.

They will create a plan for pain management customized for you. It can even involve a combination of different types of therapies. Each person is different; hence, a different combination of treatment could work in your case. This may entail medication management, interventional procedures, or a combination of the two.

The Downside of Opioids

Medicines, such as NSAIDs (non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs), along with opiods such as morphine and methadone, can also be prescribed for pain management. However, it should be borne in mind that if you take opioids for long term, you could become addicted to the drugs.

In some cases, it takes very little time to develop an addiction. This means that you might experience withdrawal symptoms when you attempt to stop taking the medication. These symptoms could be in the form of tremors and nervousness or diarrhea and so on.

This is a normal response and one that need not concern you much. It is somewhat different from addiction, as there is no craving for the drug apart from the need for curing the pain. Today, researchers are working to produce opioids that are less addictive and will have minimal side effects.

Treating the Cause

Many techniques, such as heat and ice along with ultrasound and medications can only provide temporary relief. Once the patient returns to his or her normal lifestyle, the pain comes back in full swing. This is because the treatment is being targeted at the symptom rather than the cause of the pain.

At times, if the root cause can be established, treatment with physical therapy can help alleviate the pain substantially. However, with current pain management techniques it’s often not possible to cure the condition. It is  possible, however, to achieve pain relief a lot of the time with procedures such as epidural or facet injections.

When it comes to injuries sustained at work, Arizona Injury Medical Associates is the premier Arizona Worker’s Compensation doctor. Dr. Demitri Adarmes is a Double Board Certified AZ and Federal Work Injury doctor, with the office being experts in the administrative aspects of worker’s compensation claims, both state and OWCP.