I believe and important part of developing an effective pain management plan includes having an understanding of each person’s lifetime history with pain and pain management going back to early childhood if possible.  What people experience as children when they have pain does impact their perceptions about pain and what to do about being in pain.
 
I’ve seen a very wide spectrum of family history where on one end of the spectrum people learn that when they have pain they are to “tough it out” and not “complain and cry.”  They learn that it’s a sign of weakness to show pain.  Now on the other extreme end of this spectrum is where someone learns that when they’re in pain they get nurtured, extra attention, and pain is quickly medicated—and sometimes over-medicated. 

I’ve seen significant research over the years about how pain in childhood does impact how people are able to effectively manage their pain and also are more likely to experience chronic pain as an adult.  I was looking at a new website today—www.massagemag.com—and on their research page I found the research posting that I’ve copied below.

Childhood Pain Patterns: Research 5/19/2008

Pain experienced during childhood can lead to chronic pain in adulthood, according to recent research.  The mid-May annual meeting of the American Pain Society featured research showing that children who complained of multiple symptoms in childhood, including abdominal pain and headache, were three times more likely to have chronic pain problems as adults than children who infrequently complained about pain.
 
Another childhood-adulthood link reported by Gary Macfarlane, M.D., professor of epidemiology at University of Aberdeen, Scotland, School of Medicine, is that babies who were treated in intensive care units and had invasive procedures showed reduced sensitivity to pain as children.

“Around age 10, individuals treated in ICUs as babies scored higher on pain threshold tests using heat as the pain stimulus, demonstrating that early pain experiences might influence how you perceive pain later” he said.

Macfarlane’s research focused on 17,000 British children who were born in 1958 and who have been studied to adulthood. The American Pain Society is a multidisciplinary community of scientists, clinicians and other professionals working to increase the knowledge of pain and transform public policy and clinical practice to reduce pain-related suffering.

If you want to learn more about chronic pain management please check out our website at www.addiction-free.com and go to our Ariticles page for more information and download my free article Treating People in Chronic Pain.