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| | Title: | Do you feel Pain? | | Article: |
What is pain? Many references and dictionaries define the pain as an unpleasant sensation that is signaling about an injury. Well, you know, there are many different unpleasant sensations that are caused by tissue damage. Fortunately or rather unfortunately, practically everybody knows what pain is.
Pain has physical and emotional components. Not always a pain has the tissue damage as a reason.
Why perceiving the pain is important for a human?
It is important for protection. It allows decreasing harmful effects of different actions. For example, patient with diabetes often develop neuropathy, when small nerves are damaged and do not transfer the pain impulses. This often leads to multiple damages of the feet, because of small traumas, cuts, burns and so on. The ankle joint may become inflamed and stiff eventually because of multiple injuries, that patient do not feel. This is named Charcot Foot. The condition often leads to serious infections of the feet that could be prevented in the early stage if the patient would feel the pain. Similarly, some congenital insensitivity causes multiple small damages that accumulate, including infections, fractures and burns.
So, you see, pain is important for survival. Pain signals you about possible injury and thus prevents from additional damage. Besides, in the time of healing, the injured area aches and prevents a person from extensive movements. This keeps the damaged region still. This in turn helps for the healing. Otherwise too much moving would destroy the weak new tissue during the healing process.
Pain actually is a subjective experience and there is a lot of psychology to it.
What is interesting is that the brain itself does not feel pain, because there are no pain receptors in brain. You can see it during some neurosurgical operations, when a surgeon even can talk to patient, doing the brain surgery in the same time (some types of operation of course, do not think it is always that a patient is awake). Headaches, for example are going not from the brain itself, but from he the membrane that surrounds the brain. The membrane is named Dura mater
Headaches and back pains are the most common pains.
Pain can be acute or chronic.
Acute pain is short-term, usually with an obvious cause.
Chronic pain lasts more than 6 months. However some authors understand it as the pain that persists longer than usual for a disorder. Chronic pain does not help in preventing damage. Chronic pain also does not respond to pain meds well in contrast to acute pain.
Nociceptors are pain detecting receptors. (nocere = pain in Latin)
Skin pain receptors sit just below the upper layer of the skin.
Skin injury causes cutaneous pain. (Cutis=skin in Latin).
Significant amount of nociceptors in the skin cause well-defined, sharp pain after cuts, bruises, lacerations and small burns.
Concentration of somatic receptors is not so dense. (Soma = body in Latin). The somatic pain receptors bring the feeling of pain from bones, ligaments, tendons, muscles.
Thus, the pain from broken bones, sprained ligaments and muscles is not well defined and rather dull in nature,
Viscera mean organs in Latin.
Visceral pain comes from organs. The receptors for visceral pain have low concentration. Thus, the pain from organs and body cavities is not localized. Often this produces "referred" pain. What Is Referred Pain?
It goes from another area. Let's say pain during heart attack feels like aching left arm or jaw. Sometime it even feels rather like heartburn then a heart pain. This happens because sensations from the heart and the arm go to the same spinal nerve cells.
Phantom pain happens in persons with amputations. They already lost a leg or arm but still feel as if the pain comes form non-existent body part. Often the term for this is causalgia, which means burning stinging pain. Sometime it is extremely intensive pain.
Neuralgia is neuropathic pain. That means the damage to a nerve. The damaged and badly healed nerve gives a false sensation of pain in some part of the body, thought there is no and obvious reason that can be easily identified.
For example, trigeminal neuralgia is when a patient experience excruciating pain in the area of distribution of trigeminal nerve (on the face), though the damage is actually in the area trigeminal ganglion usually (which is much deeper and sitting in a special small bony pit in your scull.
It is still questionable if plants or worms or let s say spiders can feel pain. They obviously avoid damaging actions; however it is not proved well if they fill pain.
Some people believe that fish do not fell pain. However, there were reports that some fish may show pain responses.
Keywords: pain, painful, headache, neck pain, analgesia, alternative medicine
| | Author: | Aleksandr Kavokin, MD, PhD | | System: | Symptoms | | Subject: | Pain | | Abstract: | Pain has physical and emotional components. Not always a pain has the tissue damage as a reason.
| | Website: | http://www.rdoctor.com | | Time: | 13:31 | | Reference: | http://www.kavokin.com | | Reference 2: | http://www.symptomat.com |
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Articles by Aleksandr Kavokin, MD, PhD
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