Chronic pain is pain that has lasted for a long time. In medicine, the distinction between acute and chronic pain has traditionally been determined by an arbitrary interval of time since onset; the two most commonly used markers being 3 months and 6 months since onset, though some theorists and researchers have placed the transition from acute to chronic pain at 12 months. Others apply acute to pain that lasts less than 30 days, chronic to pain of more than six months duration, and subacute to pain that lasts from one to six months. A popular alternative definition of chronic pain, involving no arbitrarily fixed durations is "pain that extends beyond the expected period of healing."
Read more about Chronic Pain: Classification, Pathophysiology, Management, Epidemiology, Comorbidities and Sequelae
Famous quotes containing the words chronic and/or pain:
“Before now poetry has taken notice
Of wars, and what are wars but politics
Transformed from chronic to acute and bloody?”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even,—for that is the seat of sympathy,—he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)