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Last updated: Tue, Jan 14, 2025
Pure pain is never detected as an isolated sensation. Pain is always accompanied by emotion and meaning so that each pain is unique to the individual. The word pain is used to group together a class of combined sensory-emotional events. The class contains many different types of pain, each of which is a personal, unique experience for the person who suffers.
Take a few moments to feel your own pain. The first thing you may notice is its intensity. If your pain is sufficiently intense and sudden, you may notice nothing more about it than its intensity. However, pain almost always also has a location. Depending on what caused the pain, its location may be clear and exact. You may be able to point to where it hurts. In other cases, a region of your body may hurt. I've sometimes felt pain that seems to exist outside the limits of my skin, which feels as strange as it sounds.
Pain usually has qualities beyond its strength and location. It may be sharp or dull, electric or biting, and so on. Again, these qualties depend on the cause of the pain. You can feel the unpleasantness of the pain separately from the intensity of the sensation. Two pains of the same intensity may differ in their unpleasantness. OK, that's enough feeling.
Pain is always a feeling that conveys information about you to you. We all experience this, and we use the pain feelings to adjust our activities. For most people this is pretty much all you need to know about pain. The pain system works pretty well for most of us most of the time.
Pain is produced by your nervous system. It is produced by specialized sensory nerves, the spinal cord, and the brain working together. Each of these components has its function, each is complex, and each is "plastic," meaning that it is changeable. Each component is adaptable, meaning that the components change in respons e to the conditions they encounter.
The pain system performs an important biologic function. In its normal operation it gives you a real-time warning that your tissue is in danger or it has been damaged. It also trains you to avoid similar situations in the future. Normal pain is healthy.
Pain sensation is complex. At the time of injury, there is often a fast, sharp pain followed by a slow, aching pain. Beyond this, different pains have several important qualities beyond their intensity and duration. These qualities are important in diagnosis and of course in the experience of sufferers. Pain's intensity usually gets the most attention.
The pain that an injury causes immediately is termed "acute." Pain that can't be explained as acute tends to be labeled "chronic," although the term "chronic" is used in several different ways.
The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) has long used a definition of pain as an "experience." This definition acknowledges that pain is "subjective," which means, among other things, that it does not exist in the world outside of the person who experiences it. This definition, which was devised for the purposes of the IASP, nevertheless points out that we can't see, touch, or feel another's pain. This has broad implications for what we can agree to about pain.
In medical practice, pain is characterized by the existence of many "co-morbidities." These co-morbidities are conditions or syndromes that are known to be related to pain, but which are treated as separate conditions in the medical clinic. The category of "co-morbidity" is thus an institutional category and not a scientific one.
Pain has a huge impact on individual lives and on the economy at large. It is therefore a matter of community interest.
Within this section...
The Basic Anatomy and Physiology of Pain (Last updated: Mon, Apr 1, 2024)
The Adaptive Value of Pain (Last updated: Fri, Jul 26, 2024)
The Varieties of Pain (Last updated: Mon, Aug 26, 2024)
Co-morbidities (Last updated: Sat, Feb 22, 2025)
A Brief Epidemiology of Pain (Last updated: Fri, May 31, 2024)
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Pain Science 2: Nociceptors and the Spine (Last updated: Thu, Nov 21, 2024)