What Is Pain?
December 24, 2008 by rainier
The International Association for the Study of Pain defines it as: An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage.
It is useful to distinguish between two basic types of pain, acute and chronic, and they differ greatly.
Acute pain, When you first experience pain, it is a symptom of illness or injury in the part of your body that is having the 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. This could be a simple action such as the reflex that makes you jerk your hand off a hot stove, or it could be more complex such as cooling, resting, or elevating an injured ankle. Or the pain could prompt you to see a doctor.
Chronic pain is widely believed to represent disease itself. It can be made much worse by environmental and psychological factors. Chronic pain persists over a longer period of time than acute pain and is resistant to most medical treatments. It can-and often does-cause severe problems for patients. Pain management is an integral part of treating chronic pain.
Chronic pain impairs the ability to direct attention, in particular when compared to peers with low intensity or no chronic pain, people with high-intensity chronic pain have significantly reduced ability to perform attention-demanding tasks.The pain sensations appear to strongly capture the attention of people with chronic pain; tests assessing the ability to attend show poorer performance than peers who do not experience chronic pain on all tests demanding attention.The exception is found with tasks that are highly demanding of attention, where performance between the two groups is equivalent. In experimental testing, two-thirds of individuals with chronic pain demonstrate clinically significant impairment of attention, independent of age, education, medication and sleep disruption. Individuals with the highest levels of pain showed greatest disruption of memory traces, suggesting that pain diminishes working memory.
Comments
2 Responses to “What Is Pain?”Trackbacks
Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] visceral pain differs significantly from other types of pains has been appreciated by clinicians for centuries. [...]
[...] circulation is often a cause of chronic pain. Poor circulation is usually caused by tobacco use, diabetes, or various autoimmune diseases [...]