The acute pain is a little different from chronic pain; Acute pain is an evolutionary response of the body.
It’s a way of your body saying, “Hey something is wrong, you need to fix it” it’s like the flight or fight mechanism. You put your hand on fire, you remove your hand from the fire. That’s an acute process and your body has evolved to respond in such way.
Acute pain is actually something that is evolutionary; you have surgery. It’s painful for the first few days, but as your body starts to heal you feel better. And that’s because there are some injury in your body that communicates to your brain that you’re experiencing pain.
Now when this communication persists, when there is pain perceived by the body, while there is no more injury, surgery has healed, then we’re entering the realm of chronic pain and that’s what we call maladapt.
There are many strategies that we use, first of all we use escalating dose of medications only if necessary. We use different classes of medications in order to spare the ones that are usually abusable, there are medications for nerve-type pain, there are medications for muscle-type pain, there are medications for bone-type pain. And if you use the medications with the understanding and knowledge of the types of pains, you can actually use them at a lower doses with the same effectiveness.