PAIN ACTIVITY CYCLE

With a persistently painful medical condition, pain and activity have an inverse, cyclical relationship. Increases in pain produce decreases in activity which subsequently produce increases in pain, and so on. Like dominoes falling, pain and activity will knock each other down unless the cycle is disrupted. Why does this happen? 

Injury and pain in a body part almost inevitably results in even greater pain upon activity or movement. It hurts to walk on a sprained ankle, so we learn to rest it. For very brief periods of pain, decreased activity and rest are perfectly healthy and adaptive. However, if the pain doesn’t go away, decreased activity over time causes decreased blood flow, decreased range of motion in the painful body part,  muscle weakness and contraction, and even atrophy of the connective tissue or joints. These bodily changes inevitably increase pain even more. This makes you ever more reluctant to use the injured body part a lot, which further decreases activity of the painful site. Thus, the cycle repeats through increased pain-decreased activity-increased pain.

Even if you continue to use the injured body part, pain can cause you to brace or guard the injured body part, along with overcompensation by the less injured side or associated muscles. For instance, if you have back pain that radiates down your left leg, you will probably favor your left leg which may cause increased back pain and “overuse” pain in your right hip or knee. This pain-activity cycle helps explain the reality of escalating pain in many chronically painful conditions even without increased tissue damage of the original painful site.

A critical element in the rehabilitation of chronic pain is breaking the pain-activity cycle. The PRISM line of topical compounds is an integral part of this element of your rehabilitation. If the PRISM compounds provide analgesia, you should be able to increase activity and movement. This speeds life-giving blood and oxygen to the painful area. Then you can meaningfully work toward increasing strength, flexibility, and endurance in your painful, less active body part.         

Oral medications are processed through the stomach, then the liver, and carried through the bloodstream to all parts of the body including the brain. Powerful oral pain relievers often have numerous side effects including fatigue, mental fogginess, depression, anxiety, etc. These side effects can make activity and exercise more difficult. Transdermal medications, placed directly on the skin, are only minimally filtered through the bloodstream. Thus, they do not generally have the widespread side effects of many oral medications, especially grogginess. More importantly, the pain relieving medications go directly to the site of pain, often providing regional pain relief with a much lower dose.

There is no such thing as an extremely effective, inexpensive, all-natural, topical pain reliever. Over-the-counter topicals usually contain one or two nonprescription medications (menthol or methyl salicilate) that often serve mainly to distract you from pain, rather than attacking the pain trigger itself. Powerful prescription medications usually attack the root cause in addition to providing soothing analgesia. If you took oral medications for your pain condition, the doctor would prescribe different medications for different types or sources of pain. One medication can’t work best for all types of pain. An anti-inflammatory will not help purely nerve-based pain. The same is true of the medications in topical creams. No one medication is best for all types of pain. The four compounds that comprise the PRISM line of topiceuticals contain twenty different medications, each of which is used for pain relief.