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Last updated: Sun, May 26, 2024
Care providers will often characterize pain according to your diagnosis. For example, you might be told that you have "low back pain" or "fibromyalgia pain." To the care provider, this usually describes a constellation of symptoms. Each of the symptoms in the constellation can be present to varing degrees in a particular sufferer. Examples of such diagnoses appear in the following sections, Co-morbidities and A Brief Epidemiology of Pain. More about diagnoses and their meaning will be included in Medical Pain Treatment.
Another characterization of pain that is used in the clinic and in research is the distinction between "neuropathic" and "non-neuropathic" pain. The IASP adopted a revised definition prior to 2013, that neuropathic pain is pain that is "caused by a lesion or disease of the somatosensory system."1 The distinction intended is between pain caused by a problem in the body (soma) versus that caused by a problem in the nervous system.
If you proceed to Pain Science 2: Nociceptors and the Spine and Pain Science 3: Neuroscience and the Brain, you'll see that our nervous system is quite able to produce unwelcome and un-useful pain while working according to plan, that is, with no sort of lesion. Diseases of the nervous system can of course be defined by the medical community. In addition, it isn't the case that all pain is generated by the somatosensory system as the term is usually understood. The autonomic system can also be a contributor. (See Pain Science 4: Partner Systems.)