Chronic Pain

Chronic pain can be awful. You might experience persistent pain that doesn’t go away after an injury has healed, or suffer from conditions like arthritis or fibromyalgia that bring constant discomfort. This pain can make it challenging to engage in daily activities and enjoy life. Often, pain not only affects your physical health but also your mental well-being, making it hard to maintain a positive outlook.

Dealing with chronic pain is something I have a lot of experience with (I suffer from chronic pain and spent two years working in a public health chronic pain team), so if you are suffering, don’t hesitate to book an appointment to speak to me. If you do want to speak to me about chronic pain I strongly encourage you to read the rest of this page before booking in.

Chronic Pain Symptoms

Living with chronic pain means more than just dealing with the physical discomfort. The emotional toll it takes can be just as significant, impacting your mood, sleep, and overall quality of life. Chronic pain can involve:

Getting Help with Chronic Pain

Second, chronic pain is usually the result of multiple inputs. There might be an ongoing disease process, and some unhelpful behaviours, and stress/anxiety (and many other factors) all contributing to your overall experience of pain.
Third, sometimes chronic pain won’t resolve until you do a good enough job addressing as many of the inputs as possible. This can be: time consuming; expensive; involve getting second, third or fourth opinions from health professionals; and, overall can be a stressful experience.
Fourth, there are a lot of health professionals who say they help people with chronic pain but either don’t actually know a lot about it.
Given these difficulties it can be hard to know where to start. Luckily in Melbourne there are quite a few health professionals who are experts in Chronic Pain.
I think it is vitally important to know that getting improvement is not only possible but that many people do get significant reductions in pain or even complete resolution after putting a chunk of work into it. However, this can be a long process and you need to take control of it. You may need to see a number of health professionals, spend quite a bit of time educating yourself about chronic pain, and if relevant, you might have to put time and effort into changing your lifestyle, habits and psychology.

Where to Start

Given I don’t know why you have chronic pain I can’t be 100% sure of the best place to start but the following are places to start. You do not need to do these in the order listed:
See your GP and determine if you have any active disease processes that may be contributing to chronic pain and come up with a plan to treat or manage them as best you can.
See a psychologist. If you think that there are any psychological factors contributing to or directly causing your chronic pain I would book into see a psychologist. To be honest, this is going to be almost everyone because:

What’s Next

Get a referral from your GP or Pain specialist to a public health pain program. There are a number of Pain Clinics run by public hospitals in Melbourne. Unfortunately, waitlists can be long (that is, one to two years), the clinics can be limited in what they offer, and the quality varies. On the other hand it is free so it doesn’t hurt to get that referral in.
Get a referral from your GP or Pain specialist to a private health pain program. Quite a few private hospitals run pain programs and unlike the public programs the waitlists are much shorter. On the other hand they can also cost quite a bit of money and the quality varies.
Read books about Chronic Pain. There are a lot of books out there on Chronic Pain. I would suggest start with the books put out by the NOI Group and then branch out from there.
I hope this information helps you find the support you need. If you are struggling with chronic pain and its impacts on your life, please consider reaching out to me.
Scroll to Top