The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP, 1994) defined the word pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.” A central distinction in the assessment and often the treatment of pain has to do with its temporal characteristics. Acute pain has a fairly clear onset and importantly a reasonably clear offset, such as pain experienced post-operatively. Almost always the goal of treatment is eradication of the pain and this is typically accomplished with analgesic medications. When the offset of pain is not so distinct and the pain either frequently recurs or continues, it is referred to as recurrent or chronic. Exactly where one draws the line between acute and chronic pain is not always easy to define. In the past, arbitrary definitions were generated, such that if pain went on for 3 or 6 months, it was no longer considered to be acute, but instead chronic in nature.
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Notes
- 1.
Professor John J. Bonica, an anesthesiologist who founded the International Association for the Study of Pain, said that the only pain that is benign is pain being experienced by someone else.
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Walco, G.A., Rozelman, H., Maroof, D.A. (2009). The Assessment and Management of Chronic and Recurrent Pain in Adolescents. In: O'Donohue, W. (eds) Behavioral Approaches to Chronic Disease in Adolescence. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-87687-0_14
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