It doesn't matter when it comes to treatment. You might not need pain medication, there are many ways to manage pain. I have a whole page of typed listings of the way I manage my pain.

Once your body registers a message as pain, and that's a symptom, then you treat the pain.
You always pursue the reason/cause of the pain(s) to try and alleviate it that way as well.

I have no doubt that some of my pain is caused by misfired nerve messages (saying there's pain when the only reason for it is a mixed up message from the nerve.) It's still pain. And to boot, if I try to ignore the pain, the muscles begin to react and that can cause inflammation which causes more pain. Many things can occur as a reaction to the pain message.

So to trying to decide if your pain is "real" or not is a non sequitur ... dead end and moot. If you're feeling pain, then it's "real" and there's a reason for it. Even IF you think you're creating the pain for some psychological reason, it's still real pain to your body.