In medicine, pain relates to a sensation that hurts. If you feel pain it hurts, you feel discomfort, distress and perhaps agony, depending on the severity of it. Pain can be steady and constant, in which case it may be an ache. It might be a throbbing pain – a pulsating pain. The pain could have a pinching sensation, or a stabbing one.
Pain is an uncomfortable feeling that tells you something may be wrong in or with your body. Pain is your body’s way of sending a warning to your brain.
The perception and tolerance of pain vary widely from individual to individual, pain is difficult to define and describe. Only the person who is experiencing the pain can describe it properly. The point-prevalence for some clinically significant pain problem is one in five, 20% of the population. Pain is the most common reason for visiting a health practitioner.(1)
Pain is usually triggered most readily through some sort of tissue damage. One cannot induce sadness as readily as applying a finger prick. Yet there is no objective measure for pain, as there are for other physical processes like cholesterol or blood pressure.
There are different types of pain:
The sudden onset of pain is called acute pain. It gets your attention and prompts you to take action to prevent further worsening of the condition causing the pain. Acute pain is of short duration, usually the result of an injury, surgery or illness. This type of pain includes acute injuries, post-operative pain and post-trauma pain.
Examples of acute pain are as simple as the action of the reflex that makes you jerk your hand off a hot stove, or it could be more complex such as wrapping an injured sprained ankle with an Arctic Ease® cold compression wrap to reduce the inflammation and pain.
Chronic pain is an ongoing condition, such as back and neck pain, headaches, complex regional pain syndrome Type 1 (reflex sympathetic dystrophy), neuropathic pain (nerve injury pain), musculoskeletal pain, and pain related to illnesses such as osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis or fibromyalgia.
Untreated pain can and does get worse; this is known as the “wind-up phenomenon”. This phenomenon causes nerve fibers transmitting painful impulses to the brain to become “trained” to deliver pain signals for efficiently. Just as muscles get better and have greater endurance in sports with training, the nerves become more effective at sending pain signals to the brain. The intensity of the signals increases over and above what is needed to get your attention. To make matters even worse, the brain becomes more sensitive to the pain. So your pain feels much worse even though your injury or illness is not getting any worse. At this point, pain is termed to be chronic pain. Pain at this point is no longer helpful as a signal of illness.
Chronic pain is no different than any other life changing disease state, for example, diabetes or high blood pressure. If you need to be on pain medicine for the rest of your life, you need to recognize that you are not “addicted” to pain medicine any more than a person with diabetes who needs to be on insulin for the rest of his or her life should be said to be “addicted” to insulin.
When you work with your healthcare team the ultimate goal is to be cured. That means that you want the cause of your pain to be found and cured so that you can resume a normal quality of life, ideally without the needs for medications or additional medical visits.
(1) Dr. David Pincus, The Chaotic Life
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