It depends on the pain, TBH. If I was going to say "overall", then hell fucking yes movement is the only long term solution. There is the aches that are my "normal". Those nothing will help- you just gotta power through them or get surgery. My arm is fused at a 90* angle and there is stabbing pain in the elbow that I have learned to ignore. With that comes a swelling in my fingers from decreased circulation- again, just tough it out because it will go away.  Then there is the stiffness pain, like how you feel when you wake up on a cold morning but constant. You HAVE to move- that is the only way to fix that kind of pain. It feels like someone pulled all your muscles tight and out your back at first, but the more you move the more you shorten that kind of pain. When I first started working out, it took me almost two hours of pain to get out of bed. Now I am out of bed in 10-15 minutes.  Then there is the fuck-it-all pain. On a scale of 1-10, this is straight out of the devil's ass 100... and I gave birth without any drugs. You can't power through it, you can't do shit. Those days are the ones where I just pop some pills (oxy) and wait for them to kick in. But working out DOES NOT make these come any more freq  7ffa  uently for me.