Whenever breaking a bone or spraining something or things of that nature, PTs and orthopedists always say “if it doesn’t hurt it’s fine.”
What would be scenarios where pain (or lack thereof) DOESN’T properly let you know if something is fully healed or injured or not?
In: Biology
There are situations where people do feel pain after physical injuries are healed. So the presence of pain is not always an accurate signal of a limitation to activity, but rather indicates a need to investigate. For long-lasting pain, patients may be instructed about differences between *hurt* and *harm*, and need to try to do activities even though they are painful, under medical supervision.
For new pain, though, usually there’s some injury.
I’ve heard anecdotally that sometimes people with stress fractures don’t initially experience as much pain as you would expect but the pain will tend to worsen if activity continues.
As a whole, pain is not a wholly accurate sign of severity or presence of injury, but medical professionals can use the level of pain along with context of the injury and other symptoms to make good predictions of what has happened.
Latest Answers