“What can be done for a low pain tolerance? ”

You would need to schedule with a pain management specialist so that they can order imaging and determine what the underlying cause of your pain is. Once that is discovered, they would be able to recommend treatments that could help alleviate some of that pain for you so that you can improve your quality of life and get back to the things you love.

“Low pain tolerance” is a difficult phenomenon to treat primarily because pain itself is a subjective experience based upon the brains PERCEPTION of either real or possible potential body/tissue damage. Pain itself is therefore comprised of actual or imagined incoming (afferent) signals from the body to the spinal cord and then the brain, where it is processed and then depending on a wide variety of existing and preexisting issues (genetics, preexisting and coexisting physiologic diseases), plus the person's own psychological status, ALL enters into the equation of how much “pain” is actually experienced. Thus, first and foremost, it is important to control and identify the things you can and do what you can about those. As many things are completely out of our control (picking our parents for instance! Lol). Step one is stop anything that will produce and worsen any hyperalgesia (frequent or chronic use of analgesics, especially narcotics), as these are well known to produce low pain tolerance due to hyperalgesia due to glial cell neuroinflammation. Also, obviously ruling out any physical disease states that might be causing pain in the first place. Mental conditioning, cognitive behavioral psychological therapies are known to increase pain tolerances. Anxiety reduction is very important. We all have stress. How we respond to stress is paramount.

Low pain tolerance may be related to high doses of opioids, especially short acting opioids like Percocet. Tapering down opioids may be the answer.