Pain Management
At Cottage Health, we focus on a multidisciplinary team approach to provide compassionate and comprehensive services to decrease pain, encourage coping strategies, and improve function and the quality of life. Active patient participation in the treatment plan is encouraged and therapies are specified for each individual.
Chronic pain is a complex syndrome that adversely affects a person's physical, emotional, socioeconomic, and spiritual well-being. It can disrupt and impact quality of life.
Cottage Health is committed to improving the lives of people with chronic pain. Our assessment, treatment and prevention services focus on enriching the lives of the people we serve. We integrate traditional and complementary medicine into our approach.
Treatment goals include:
- Diagnose and treat chronic pain syndromes
- Reduce pain and increase comfort
- Increase the ability to manage pain and related problems
- Increase physical capabilities and activities
- Support the return to productive activity
- Minimize the use of medications
- Increase coping, self-care and stress management skills
- Improve the quality of life
Experiencing & Measuring Pain
Pain is an uncomfortable feeling that tells you something may be wrong inside your body. It can be acute or chronic. Acute pain can be severe and last for a relatively short time. It is usually the result of injury, surgery, or medical illness. Acute pain often goes away with the healing process. Chronic pain continues for longer periods of time. It may be mild to severe and sometimes continues despite the healing of the original injury. Treatments for acute and chronic pain can be quite different.
For pain management to work you need to have some way to help your doctors and nurses understand how much you are hurting. You will be asked to use a pain rating scale to do this. For example, on a scale of 0 to 10 – from no pain to the worst pain you can imagine – how much pain do you have right now? You may set up a pain control goal, such as having no pain worse than number four on the scale. Reporting your pain as a number helps you and the healthcare team know how well your treatment is working and whether changes need to be made.
