Fishermen Wellness: Chronic Pain

Most people have felt pain in some way shape or form.

You twist your ankle, you sleep wrong, you bang your knee on something. After a few days, maybe a week or two, plus some icing and ibuprofen, your body heals and the pain fades. It hurts, but then it usually gets better. That's called acute pain, and it's your body doing exactly what it's supposed to do: alerting you to an injury and then feeling better once the problem is resolved.

Chronic pain is different.

Chronic pain is pain that persists for three months or longer, often well after the original injury has healed. Sometimes this happens without any clear injury at all. And it doesn't always feel the same from one day to the next.

For commercial fishermen, chronic pain is not a rare or abstract concept. It is an occupational reality that builds over years, shaped by the physical demands of work that most people will never fully understand.

You don't have to feel pain all the time for something to be chronic.

One of the biggest misconceptions about chronic pain is that it means constant, severe pain every single day. That's not necessarily how it works, and that misunderstanding is part of why so many people push through it for years without seeking help.

Chronic pain can feel like a lot of different things. Some days it might be a dull ache in your hands that makes it hard to grip a coffee mug in the morning but loosens up after an hour. Other days the pain might flare badly because it's triggered by cold weather or a stretch of heavy work. And then there might be stretches where it barely registers at all, which can make it easy to tell yourself it's not really a problem.

But the pattern matters more than any single day. When pain keeps coming back, when it changes how you move or what you're able to do, when you start adjusting your work or your life around it without even realizing it — that's chronic pain.

How Chronic Pain Develops for Commercial Fishermen

Fishing is one of the most physically demanding jobs in the world.

Think about hauling traps. Bending forward, gripping traps, lifting, pulling, and twisting. This happens over and over and over every time you are out hauling. Over time, the muscles and joints adapt to that stress, but adaptation has limits. What starts as soreness after a hard day can become a persistent ache that's there whether you worked the day before or not.

Hauling nets puts similar pressure on the shoulders, neck, and upper back. The combination of pulling weight, working in awkward positions on a moving deck, and doing it repeatedly across years adds up in ways that don't always show up on an X-ray but show up clearly in how you feel and move.

Then there's the hand and wrist work. Squeezing hog ring pliers repeatedly for hours at a time, mending nets, banding lobsters, shucking scallops, and cutting fish puts sustained stress on the tendons and small muscles of the hand and forearm. These are not dramatic, explosive movements but small, repeated, cumulative ones.

That's actually how a lot of chronic pain gets started: not from one bad moment, but from thousands of ordinary ones.

Cold and wet conditions make all this harder on the body. Cold causes muscles to tighten and reduces blood flow to the extremities, which means hands and joints that are already working hard are doing so with less circulation and less flexibility. Working on a moving vessel adds an element of constant low-level balance and stabilization effort which your core and legs are always compensating for, even when you don't notice it.

What Chronic Pain Can Look Like

Because chronic pain doesn't always announce itself loudly, it's worth knowing the different forms it can take.

Persistent aching or stiffness. This is the most common presentation — a background-level discomfort that's hard to pinpoint but always there. It might be worst in the morning, or at the end of a long day, or in cold weather. It's easy to normalize because it never quite rises to the level of feeling urgent.

Flares. Chronic pain often comes in waves. A period of heavy work, a change in weather, or even stress can trigger a flare — a significant increase in pain that might last hours, days, or longer. Between flares, the pain may be mild enough that it doesn't feel like a problem. But the flares are a signal.

Referred pain. Sometimes chronic pain shows up somewhere other than where the original problem is. A fisherman with chronic lower back issues might feel it most in the hips or legs. Someone with shoulder problems might notice it running down the arm. The body's pain signals don't always originate where they land.

Sensitivity. Over time, chronic pain can make the nervous system more reactive — meaning that things that didn't used to hurt start to. Pressure, cold, or movement that was previously unremarkable starts triggering a pain response. This isn't weakness; it's a well-documented neurological change that happens when pain goes unaddressed for a long time.

Fatigue and sleep disruption. Chronic pain is exhausting in ways that go beyond the physical. Managing pain takes mental energy, and pain that wakes you up or prevents deep sleep compounds over time. Fishermen already deal with demanding schedules and broken sleep. Chronic pain adds another layer that affects mood, concentration, and overall resilience.

When pain is persistent, it's natural to reach for something that takes the edge off.

For a lot of fishermen, that means ibuprofen or other over-the-counter NSAIDs, and for some it means alcohol. Both can provide short-term relief, and neither is unusual. But both carry real risks when used regularly to manage chronic pain.

NSAIDs taken frequently over a long period can cause serious damage to the stomach lining, kidneys, and cardiovascular system. They're effective for short-term inflammation, but they're not designed to be a long-term solution, and leaning on them daily is a sign that the underlying problem needs more direct attention.

Alcohol can blunt pain temporarily and help with sleep in the short term, but it disrupts deep sleep over time, increases inflammation, and can interact badly with other medications. It's also worth being honest about the fact that using alcohol to manage physical pain can quietly become its own problem. If you're reaching for something regularly just to get through the day or sleep at night, that's important information. It means the pain is running your decisions, and there are better options worth knowing about.

You Should Address Pain Early (But It's Never Too Late)

Chronic pain tends to get more complex the longer it goes unaddressed. The nervous system learns pain, and the longer a pain pattern persists, the more ingrained it becomes. What starts as a manageable issue like tight shoulders, a grumpy lower back, or elbows that ache after a long day, can become something that limits what you're able to do and affects your quality of life on and off the water.

Physical therapy is one of the most effective tools available for chronic pain, and it's worth understanding what that actually involves. A good physical therapist doesn't just give you a sheet of exercises. They assess how you move, identify where things are breaking down, and build a plan specific to your body and your work. For fishermen, that means someone who can look at the demands of hauling, gripping, lifting, and working in awkward positions and help you address the patterns that are causing pain, and build resilience against the ones that will keep coming. It's not a quick fix, but it's one of the few approaches with strong evidence behind it for long-term improvement.

There's no single fix for chronic pain, and anyone who promises otherwise should be approached with skepticism. But there are effective approaches like physical therapy, targeted exercise, ergonomic adjustments, and in some cases medical treatment that can meaningfully reduce pain and prevent it from progressing. The earlier those conversations start, the more options there are.

If you've been working through pain, adjusting around it, or telling yourself it's just part of the job, it might be worth talking to someone. It doesn't mean you're injured in a way that ends your career. It means your body is communicating something, and you deserve to know what your options are.

Unfortunately, sometimes being sore is just part of hard work. But chronic pain doesn't have to be the price of it.

Photos by David McLain