Causes and types of cancer pain

Nerve pain is also called neuropathic pain. It's caused by pressure on nerves or the spinal cord, or by damage to the nerves.

People often describe nerve pain as burning, shooting, tingling or a feeling of crawling under their skin. It can be difficult to describe exactly how it feels. Nerve pain can sometimes be more difficult to treat than other types of pain.

Some people have long term nerve pain after surgery. Nerves are cut during surgery and they take a long time to heal because they grow very slowly. In time the nerves heal, and the pain does usually go.

Nerve pain can also happen after other cancer treatments, such as radiotherapy or chemotherapy.

Cancer can spread into the bone and cause pain by damaging the bone tissue. The cancer can affect one specific area of bone or several areas.

You might also hear bone pain called somatic pain. People often describe this type of pain as aching, dull or throbbing.

Soft tissue pain means pain from a body organ or muscle. For example, you might have pain in your back caused by tissue damage to the kidney.

You can't always pinpoint this pain, but it is usually described as sharp, cramping, aching, or throbbing. Soft tissue pain is also called visceral pain.

Phantom pain means pain in a part of the body that has been removed. An example is pain in the breast area after removal of the breast (mastectomy). Or pain where you may have had an arm or leg removed due to a bone tumour.  

Phantom pain is very real and people sometimes describe it as unbearable.

Doctors are still trying to understand why phantom pain happens. One theory is that your brain's thinking section knows that part of your body has gone but your brain's feeling section can't understand this. Other possible causes are poor pain control at the time of surgery.

Between 50 to 80 out of every 100 people (between 50 to 80%) who have had part of the body removed get phantom pain. In most people the pain goes away after a few months, or gets less after the first year. But some people can still feel phantom pain after a year or more.

Sometimes people can feel pain from an organ in the body but in a different part of their body. This is called referred pain.

For example, a swollen liver may cause pain in the right shoulder, even though the liver is under the ribs on the right. This is because the liver presses on nerves that end in the shoulder.