5 - Understanding your pain can be key

…so important for learning how to manage it. I didn’t understand it for many, many years.

“I believed, for example, that for anything that hurt I could go to see my GP and get it ‘fixed’, either with a treatment or with a prescription for a medication. In reality of course, that isn’t always the case. Learning that pain doesn’t always mean there is damage was so important. It stays in my mind whenever I have a flare up of my pain.

“Flippin’ my understanding of pain – learning the basics about pain and how it works – has helped me enormously.

“It has allowed me manage my pain in ways that I didn’t know existed. There are many techniques to explore: it’s not ‘one size fits all’.”

– Louise, person with experience of persistent pain