13/10/2017
" “pain is an unpleasant conscious experience that emerges from the brain when the sum of all the available information suggests that you need to protect a particular part of your body.”
Pain is, therefore, the sum of your environmental context (i.e., a calm or stressed environment; a battlefield, hospital, home), the degree of danger signal (nociception), your beliefs, your expectations, and your past experiences, as well as many other factors. You will experience pain only when your body perceives a large-enough threat in relation to the context (12,13). In layman’s terms, you could reconceptualize pain as the body’s alarm system, which reacts to threat, danger, and injury. The alarm (pain) is often activated when we get an injury, but the alarm system is highly intelligent and has the ability to warn us before we get an injury, thereby increasing the probability that we avoid the injury.
The legendary Danish doctor and anatomy professor, Dr. Finn Bojsen-Møller, stated: “It is fundamental to the body’s self-protection ability that pain begins before reaching the breaking point. Without the painful experience, there is no possibility of keeping the body and tissue intact and whole (14).”
This scientific research, and its implications, are both good news and bad news. The good news is that, through advances in pain science research, we have a much more complete understanding of what pain is. The bad news that emerges from this research, however, is that pain is a complex experience influenced by multiple factors. This means that there are no quick fixes to the complex problem that is pain, and this is a big challenge for the health professionals who are trying to sell quick fixes. But it also gives hope for new advances in pain treatments that integrate the complexity and multifactorial nature of pain. "
Although we grow up believing that injuries and pain are closely linked, this is not always the case. Various studies between tissue damage and pain show that we can have one without the other. Pain, it turns out, is a relatively complex problem, relying on environmental context and a host of other…
