In school we learned about the 3 basic pain classifications, acute, subacute and chronic but there is also another method of classifying pain, Nociceptive, Neurogenic and Nociplastic.
Nociceptive pain, is when pain is simply from any stress or injury to the physical tissues in the body, be it a fracture or kidney stones.
Neurogenic pain as you may guess, any pain related to an irritation or a pathology in the neural tissue, be in sciatica or diabetic neuropathy.
And finally, Nociplastic is when pain arises from a malfunction of the pain system itself and heavily influenced by psychosocial factors.
“Nociplastic Pain is a term used to describe persistent pain that arises from altered nociception, despite no clear evidence of actual or threatened tissue damage causing the activation of peripheral nociceptors, or evidence for disease or lesion of the somatosensory system causing the pain.” –IASP
As I gain more and more clinical experience as the years go by, I realize that most of my patients are experiencing Nociplastic pain. Whereas in the past, I mostly just assumed it was the other 2 types of pains. I wish I knew what I know now, I could have perhaps helped them more instead of focusing on “fixing” them :o(