Pain: Causes, Types & Treatment Options

Muscular pain is the most common cause of pain, and is one of the most frequent reasons people consult their doctor. This can result from an acute injury, such as an ankle sprain during sports, or longstanding back pain from a poor posture, poor technique in lifting heavy objects, or a sedentary lifestyle.

Muscular pain usually occurs on movement, especially when you activate that specific muscle group. Healing is helped immediately after an injury to rest, ice packs, and simple painkillers, if necessary. In the medium term, you need to get moving and stretching the injured muscle group – not to the point of pain, but it might feel a bit uncomfortable, and painkillers may help to get this rehabilitation done. In the long term, you need to consider what caused the injury – did you warm up properly before a match or gym session, were you using the right technique to lift something, could you improve your core and adapt your workstation to improve posture?

Bone pain is similar, worse on movement, but may be constantly present on some level, and will gnaw away at you. You wouldn’t ignore a broken leg, but sometimes people have more subtle disease processes affecting a bone. It can feel severe, and may wake you at night. It’s important to get any persistent pain that wakes you checked out by a doctor.

Nociceptive pain occurs when there is damage to a particular part of the body and it alerts your brain to the problem via nerves. It includes muscular and bone pain, but also pain from a blister where your shoe rubs, an oven burn on your finger, joint pain from inflammatory arthritis, tooth pain, chest pain from angina, abdominal pain from appendicitis. In essence, damage to a particular tissue alerts the nervous system that something is wrong, and it tells the brain to do something about it (like take your hand off the hot plate). It will be made worse or better in certain positions, with certain movements, or worse with load (lifting or weight bearing).

Some divide this further into visceral and somatic pain. Visceral pain is more likely to involve organs and their connecting structures, and it’s therefore often diffuse and hard to pinpoint. Examples include a blocked urinary catheter, kidney stones causing obstruction, angina, appendicitis or a stomach tumour. People describe it as crampy, deep, throbbing, sharp, intense, and sometimes feeling like a pressure or heaviness, especially when it relates to the heart.

Somatic pain originates from skin, joints, muscle or bone, and any of their connecting tissues, and it’s probably more familiar to us. People use words like sore, burning, sharp, aching, deep, dull and gnawing. It will usually be quite focused so people can point to the problem area with accuracy.

This is when a nerve gets pinched (a trapped nerve, commonly in the neck), inflamed, such as in sciatica, or damaged, as in diabetes, alcoholism or multiple sclerosis. It’s damage to the nervous system itself, rather than a part of the body alerting the nervous system that there’s a problem. Neuropathic pain can involve the peripheral nervous system, such as nerves to the arms or legs, or the central nervous system, which is the brain and spinal cord. You may get neurological dysfunction, such as reduced muscle power, pins and needles, tingling or numbness or reduced sensation to touch. Carpal tunnel syndrome is a good example, where a particular nerve, the median nerve, gets squeezed as it goes through a narrow tunnel or bones and tendons in your wrist, causing distinctive tingling and pain in certain fingers.

People often describe shooting or stabbing pains that stop them in their tracks, or a burning sensation. Think of when you hit your elbow, the “funny bone” – you are actually pranging the ulnar nerve that passes down the arm to the hand, rather than the bone.

It’s one that can be debilitating in its intensity and one that’s tricky to treat. Any trapped nerve needs to be released and it will gradually recover, such as in sciatica, where the sciatic nerve is squeezed as it goes through gaps in the pelvic bone by certain muscles – if you work on releasing your hamstring muscles, it will gradually improve, but this is difficult in the initial phase.

Neuropathic pain is more likely to lead to chronic (longstanding) pain.