Seems fairly rare to hear of someone having a knee, etc that bothers them for years provided it’s been properly treated. But hear about “bad backs” that people fight for decades.
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There’s a ton of answers on here that are focused on pain being related to damaged tissue, compressed nerves, etc. One thing that’s helped me a ton with all kinds of pain is understanding that pain is biological, psychological, and also social. (look up the bio-psycho-social model of pain). And so it can be treated better by addressing all those aspects. For instance, if you have low back pain and everyone tells you, oh don’t pick up anything heavy! Don’t bend over! Then you’ve been given a social cue that doing those things will make your pain worse, and then you have an expectation that will happen, and then you will be hyper aware of any feelings you have when you bend over or pick something up. But does bending over or picking something up actually physically damage your back? Actually “hurt” you? In many (most?) cases, probably not. Your pain has been made worse by psycho-social factors.
The “pain = mechanical damage” model seems especially oversimplified for low back pain. A huge number of pain-free people will show abnormalities in imaging of the low back. And a huge number of people with back pain will show nothing wrong in imagining. That doesn’t mean their pain isn’t real or can’t be treated.
Does that mean it’s “all in your head” and you can just stop feeling pain because you want to? No, absolutely not. It just means that to appropriately treat pain, you should address all the factors that go into it.
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