What Is Pain? What Causes Pain?

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. Only the person who is experiencing the pain can describe it properly. Pain is a very individual experience. The NIH (National Institutes of Health) National Pain Consortium estimates that the public health burden of pain affects one third of America’s population at a cost of between $560 billion and $635 billion each year. According to Medilexicon’s medical dictionary, Pain is: 1. A variably unpleasant sensation associated with actual or potential tissue damage and mediated by specific nerve fibers to the brain where its conscious appreciation may be modified by various factors 2. Term used to denote a painful uterine contraction occurring in childbirth. There are several ways to categorize pain. 

One is to separate it into acute pain and chronic pain. Acute pain typically comes on suddenly and has a limited duration. It’s frequently caused by damage to tissue such as bone, muscle, or organs, and the onset is often  accompanied by anxiety or emotional distress. Chronic pain lasts longer than acute pain and is generally somewhat resistant to medical treatment. It’s usually associated with a long-term illness, such as osteoarthritis. In some cases, such as with fibromyalgia, it’s one of the defining characteristic of the disease. Chronic pain can be the result of damaged tissue, but very often is attributable to nerve damage. Classification of Pain Classifying pain is helpful to guide assessment and treatment. There are many ways to classify pain and classifications may overlap. The common types of pain include: – Nociceptive: represents the normal response to noxious insult or injury of tissues such as skin, muscles, visceral organs, joints, tendons, or bones.

• Examples include:
• Somatic: musculoskeletal (joint pain, myofascial pain), cutaneous; often well localized
• Visceral: hollow organs and smooth muscle; usually referred

– Neuropathic: pain initiated or caused by a primary lesion or disease in the somatosensory nervous system.

• Sensory abnormalities range from deficits perceived as numbness to hypersensitivity (hyperalgesia or allodynia), and to paresthesias such as tingling.
• Examples include, but are not limited to, diabetic neuropathy, postherpetic neuralgia, spinal cord injury pain, phantom limb (post-amputation) pain, and post-stroke central pain.

– Inflammatory: a result of activation and sensitization of the nociceptive pain pathway by a variety of mediators released at a site of tissue inflammation.

•  The mediators that have been implicated as key players are proinflammatory cytokines such IL-1-alpha, IL-1-beta, IL-6 and TNF-alpha, chemokines, reactive oxygen species, vasoactive amines, lipids, ATP, acid, and other factors released by infiltrating leukocytes, vascular endothelial cells, or tissue resident mast cells
• Examples include appendicitis, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and herpes zoster.

Clinical Implications of classification Pathological processes never occur in isolation and consequently more than one mechanism may be present and more than one type of pain may be detected in a single patient; for example, it is known that inflammatory mechanisms are involved in neuropathic pain. There are well-recognized pain disorders that are not easily classifiable. Our understanding of their underlying mechanisms is still rudimentary though specific therapies for those disorders are well known; they include cancer pain, migraine and other primary headaches and wide-spread pain of the fibromyalgia type. The pain could be classify according its intensity Can be broadly categorized as: mild, moderate and severe. It is common to use a numeric scale to rate pain intensity where 0 = no pain and 10 is the worst pain imaginable:Can be broadly categorized as: mild, moderate and severe. It is common to use a numeric scale to rate pain intensity where 0 = no pain and 10 is the worst pain imaginable: Mild: <4/10 Moderate: 5/10 to 6/10 Severe: >7/10 Time course Pain duration Acute pain: pain of less than 3 to 6 months duration Chronic pain: pain lasting for more than 3-6 months, or persisting beyond the course of an acute disease, or after tissue healing is complete. Acute-on-chronic pain: acute pain flare superimposed on underlying chronic pain.   You can live without pain. We’ll be showing how the Pain relief can help you in a several situations. Stay tuned and enjoy our tips for live without constant pain