About Sensation & Pain

What Exactly is Pain?

DEFINING PAIN

An internationally recognised definition is by the International Association for the Study of Pain: “Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.” An alternative definition is offered by McCaffrey and Beebe, “Pain is whatever the experiencing person says it is, existing whenever the experiencing person says it does.” – Pain Community Centre 

The Pain Community Centre goes on to highlight these important points that can be made as a result of those definitions:

1. A painful experience is more than tissue damage triggering a nervous system response.
2. The inability to communicate verbally does not negate the possibility of pain.
3. Pain is always subjective. Individuals learn pain through experiences.
4. Pain is an experience that individuals associate with actual or potential tissue damage.
5. Pain is a sensation “within the body that is always unpleasant and therefore also an emotional experience.”

Acute Pain & Chronic Pain

• Acute pain is a protective symptom related to a causal factor.
• While chronic pain often has roots in an injury or illness, it is a condition related to sensitization of the nervous system, causing pain that is no longer reliably connected to what is happening in the body.
• See much more in Chronic Pain.

ACUTE PAIN HAS A PROTECTIVE FUNCTION

Acute pain has a protective function, it motivates us to withdraw from damaging or potentially damaging situations, protects the injured body part while it heals, and avoids those situations in the future. – Pain Community Centre 

MORE ON ACUTE PAIN

[Acute] pain doesn’t mean the system has gone haywire. It means that the system is working. It’s sending you a message that you can’t afford to ignore anymore. So the question you need to ask yourself is, “What’s bugging me? What is really going on here?” And often this inquiry works in a really rapid manner.  – Leslie Kaminoff