Last updated: Sun, Mar 9, 2025
This page is incomplete. It displays memoes and/or notes.
The continuation of pain after normal healing times have elapsed.
The question of chronicity in light of adaptive pain processing. Remind that healing isn't perfect.
Central denervation, such as in quadraplegia, paraplegia, or hemiplegia, leads to a statistically high, accelerated tendon degeneration. Radiofrequency procedures may not be an exception....Neoneurogenesis and neovasculogenesis are also integral components of degeneration.
The presence of vascular and neural ingrowt....
Deer, T. R. and Leong, M. S. eds., "Comprehensive Treatment of Chronic Pain by Medical, Interventional, and Integrative Approaches", Springer, 2013, 893
We have reviewed evidence that prolonged tender states are produced by the massive release of peptides on to substantia gelatinosa cells. It has now been discovered that such compounds can produce striking changes of slow onset and very long duration, so that ionic channels in the nerve cell membrane and enzymes within....
Melzack, R. and Wall, P. D., "The Challenge of Pain (Reprint of 1988 edition)", Penguin Books, 2008, 107
End of included memoes/notes
In several of the conditions we've mentioned here (causalgia, phantom limb pain, neuropathies), pain persists long after the normal time expected for healing of damaged tissues. The pain may occur apparently without any stimulation. This suggests a memory-like mechanism
is involved in these conditions, and perhaps in others.1
That these memory-like processes involve the central nervous system is illustrated dramatically by the failure of treatments for intractable pain that involve partial or complete severing of the spinal cord. Such treatments have been tried for a range of severe intractable pain conditions. In some cases, surgeons have severed the entire spinal cord. In others, they have severed only the ascending tracts that they believed were carrying pain signals into the brain. In some cases these treatments have initially been successful. In most cases any relief is temporary--the pain eventually reappears and increases in strength. This is evidence that pain, wherever it initially occurred, is now coming from the brain and/or the spinal cord.2 Somatotopic "memories" of the body's pain experience may account for this. See, for example, Phantom Limb Pain and Referred Pain.