By Heather Auxier, APRN-CNP
Certified Nurse Practitioner, Blanchard Valley Pain Management
What is chronic pain? This is an unfavorable, unpleasant sensory and emotional experience that is persistent lasting weeks to years.
The three types of musculoskeletal pain include nociceptive, neuropathic and nociplastic.
Nociceptive pain can be associated with tissue damage or injury. Examples of this kind of pain would include spraining your ankle or touching a hot stove.
Burning, stabbing, shooting and prickling are often descriptive words for neuropathic pain.
Often, people will say this pain travels or is radicular in nature. Other diagnoses for this kind of pain include trigeminal neuralgia, diabetic neuropathy and sciatica.
Lastly, nociplastic pain is a pain that arises from altered nociception despite no clear evidence for disease or actual threatened tissue damage, causing an activation of peripheral nociceptors or evidence for disease or lesion of the somatosensory system causing the pain. The net result of this pain is usually widespread and amplified. Fibromyalgia is considered a nociplastic type of pain.
