What are suitable pain treatments for your pain?

Finding effective pain treatments can feel like an urgent mission when you’re experiencing pain. While we love taking a glass-half-full approach to life, looking on the bright side of pain is not always easy. Nor is it always beneficial. Often, pain serves a purpose and ignoring it can have negative consequences, not to mention impact how your day/week/month is going. Figuring out a suitable pain treatment for your pain type can be challenging. We’re here to help.

We understand that finding a suitable pain treatment means so much more than just being pain free. It can mean not giving up on cooking a meal for loved ones or gossiping with a friend on a walk around the block. It can mean living your life joyfully, without having to give up on the things you love. That’s why we’re here to help you make sense of what pain is and how to manage it.

What is pain?

Let’s dive in. Pain is an important part of how our bodies function. It can let us know that something isn’t quite right. In doing so, body pain alerts us to protect ourselves from further harm by prompting us to stop what we’re doing, take stock, and avoid repeated injury or permanent damage to our bodies. Pain is what can keep us from making our situations worse than they need to be.

Pain is controlled by the nervous system and is a very complex process. It occurs when an external stimulus, for example, touching a hot pan, triggers receptor nerve cells to send messages through your spinal cord to your brain. These receptors can sense heat, cold, light, touch, pressure - and pain! Pain is always subjective. So, each of us experiences pain in our own way. Depending on its severity, as well as your body’s very own unique way of processing it, pain can bring about other physical symptoms, like nausea, dizziness and weakness.

Chronic pain, or pain that lasts for three months or more, differs from acute pain, or the temporary type of pain you may feel from an injury or strain. Chronic pain is pain that has outlasted normal healing time. Chronic pain often doesn’t serve a purpose in keeping you immobilised in order to prevent further injury. It is often residual pain from an underlying condition such as osteoarthritis, or a past injury, and is no longer a warning sign.

Although it hurts, some conditions like osteoarthritis can’t be cured, and therefore treating the pain in order to move through it, is necessary to maintain your quality of life. In this situation, it’s not ‘no pain no gain’ and toughing it out isn’t necessarily the best course of action.

Being in pain – especially chronic pain – can have quite an emotional impact. Pain can affect how you go about your daily life, keeping you away from activities you once enjoyed. It can also hamper your quality of sleep. Being sleep deprived has ties to poor short- and long-term health markers and decreased mental well-being.

What are the differences between acute pain and chronic pain?

Acute pain typically comes on suddenly and is a sign that your body has suffered some kind of damage.

Maybe you strained your back picking up a box, or even just stubbed your toe. Or maybe you just twisted your neck the wrong way. (We hate when that happens!)

Acute pain is short-lived and should go away once the injury has healed. Short-term pain treatments will keep you feeling comfortable until your injury heals.

Chronic pain lasts longer than acute pain and is sometimes resistant to pain treatments.
It is usually associated with a long-term illness. Unlike acute pain, chronic pain tends to be related to dysfunctions or diseases that stay around for a while. If you think you may be experiencing chronic pain, you should consult your doctor to get to the root of what is causing it.

Acute pain	Chronic pain
Short-lived	Long-lasting (more than 3 months)
Usually the result of an injury	Usually the result of an underlying condition or long-term illness
Examples of acute pain causes: sprains, cricked necks	Examples of chronic pain causes: osteoarthritis, Lyme’s disease
Responds well to pain treatments	Can be resistant to pain treatment

Pain Treatments

Body pain can have a myriad of causes. Understanding the type and cause of your pain will help you identify the best pain treatment for you.

The types of pain Voltarol Gel relieves can be split up into three broad categories:

Joint pain
Muscle pain
Soft tissue pain

Voltarol 2.32% Diclofenac Gel for joint and back pain relief product

A man receiving physio therapy to help manage his pain

Managing your pain is key to living life joyfully and to the fullest. This can include both medicated and non-medicated alternatives, or even a combination of the two. Here are some straightforward pain management techniques that are easy to incorporate into your repertoire:

Stretching
Therapeutic massage
Light exercise
Mindfulness meditation
Cold and heat
Biofeedback

Exercises for your pain

Looking for something else? We have a whole range of video exercises designed to help you reduce pain through movement.

Explore our videos