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:
“Only then can the chronic inattention
Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory....”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Poverty is relative, and the lack of food and of the necessities of life is not necessarily a hardship. Spiritual and social ostracism, the invasion of your privacy, are what constitute the pain of poverty.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)