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Last updated: Mon, Jul 29, 2024
Pain research has challenges that stem from the nature of pain. One neuroscientist has tied this to the fact that pain is a sensation rather than a motion. He points out that research into motor functions has made some notable progress while pain research has not, and speculates that this is because it is easy to observe the results of motor processing, but not the results of pain processing. [INCLUDE REFERENCE TO PAIN BRAIN BOOK] Certainly questions and doubts about the reliability of subjective reports of pain intensity and other pain “dimensions” has complicated research and provided room to question and doubt conclusions from the research.
Non-medical laboratory research has an additional set of complications. It is necessary to control painful stimulation in many laboratory experiments, and effective ways to do this have been developed for heat, cold, diffuse pressure, and punctate pressure. However, it is still problematic to measure the relation between stimulus level and pain level, because it is problematic to measure pain. (Many early pain experiments used electrical stimulation to provoke pain, since it is very easy to control. However, electricity stimulates the nerve while bypassing its sensory organelles, so it is not a natural mode of pain.)
It is easiest and most convenient to stimulate sensors in the skin. For that reason most pain research that involves painful stimulation has stimulated skin sensors. Unfortunately, the most problematic forms of pain, including most chronic pain, involve deep sensors which, as you saw in Acute and Chronic Pain, have different mechanisms than does cutaneous pain.
It is easiest and most convenient to study acute pain situations. In fact, it is difficult to imagine that subjects would volunteer for artificially-induced long-term pain. Although there are animal models for some chronic forms of pain, such as arthritis, these models in important ways are not comparable to human chronic conditions, which may take longer to develop within humans than the entire life span of a mice or rat. And of course the experience of pain by the experimental subjects in this type of experiment is even more occult than it is with human subjects.
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