Pain is an unpleasant sensation that indicates that something is wrong. It can be described as constant, throbbing, stabbing, aching, pinching, or in a variety of various ways. It can also be a mild inconvenience, such as a mild headache. It can also be debilitating at times.

Other physical symptoms such as nausea, dizziness, weakness, or drowsiness can occur as a result of pain. Anger, despair, mood changes, and impatience are some of the emotional side effects. Most importantly, it has the potential to alter your lifestyle and have an impact on your career, relationships, and independence.

Causes of Pain

When specialized nerves called nociceptors detect tissue injury and convey information about the damage to the brain via the spinal cord, people experience pain.

Touching a hot surface, for example, will send a message down a reflex arc in the spinal cord, causing muscles to contract immediately. The hand will be pulled away from the hot surface by this contraction, limiting further harm.

Before the message reaches the brain, this response occurs. When a person receives a pain message, they experience an unpleasant sensation called pain.

The brain’s perception of these signals, as well as the effectiveness of the nociceptors’ communication pathway with the brain, determine how a person feels pain. To counterbalance the unpleasant effects of pain, the brain may release feel-good chemicals like dopamine.

Types

Acute and chronic pain are two different types of pain.

Acute pain

This type of pain is usually severe and only lasts a few minutes. It is the mechanism through which the body notifies a person of an accident or localized tissue damage. Acute pain is usually relieved by treating the underlying injury.

Acute pain activates the fight-or-flight response in the body, which results in quicker heartbeats and respiration rates.

Acute pain can be divided into several categories:

• Somatic pain: This superficial pain is felt on the skin or in the soft tissues just beneath the skin.
• Visceral pain: Internal organs and the linings of cavities in the body are the source of this pain.
• Referred pain: A person’s visceral pain occurs somewhere else than the site of tissue damage. During a heart attack, for example, patients frequently report shoulder pain.

Chronic pain

This type of pain lasts a lot longer than acute pain, and there’s usually no way to get rid of it. Chronic pain can range in intensity from mild to severe. It might be continuous, like in arthritis, or intermittent, like in a migraine attack. Intermittent pain happens on a regular basis, but typically subsides in between flares.

People with chronic pain gradually stop having fight-or-flight reactions as the sympathetic nervous system that generates them adapts to the pain stimulus.

A accumulation of electrical signals in the central nervous system (CNS) can overstimulate nerve fibres if there are enough cases of acute pain.

The increase of electrical signals is referred to as “windup,” which is analogous to a wind-up toy. Winding a toy with thrust force causes it to run faster for longer. Chronic pain acts in the same way, which is why a person may have pain long after the triggering event.

Describing pain

Pain can be described in a variety of ways, some of which are more specific.

These include:

• Neuropathic pain: Injury to the peripheral nerves that connect the brain and spinal cord to the rest of the body causes this pain. It can produce tenderness, numbness, tingling, or discomfort and feel like electric shocks.
• Phantom pain: After a limb is removed, phantom agony develops. It describes unpleasant sensations that appear to originate from the missing limb.
• Central pain: Infarction, abscesses, tumours, degeneration, or bleeding in the brain and spinal cord are all common causes of this sort of pain. The discomfort in the centre of the body is persistent, ranging from mild to severe. Burning, aching, and pressing sensations are common in people with central pain.

Knowing how to describe pain can assist a doctor in making a more precise diagnosis.

Measuring pain

Doctors employ a variety of pain management techniques, including:

• Numerical rating scales: These scale pain from 0 to 10, with 0 representing no pain and 10 being the worst pain possible. It can be used to track how pain levels fluctuate in response to treatment or as a condition worsens.
• Verbal descriptor scale: This scale can be used by doctors to assess pain levels in children with cognitive disabilities, elderly persons, autistic people, and dyslexic people. Instead of using statistics to narrow down the sort of pain, the doctor asks a series of descriptive questions.
• Faces scale: The doctor displays a variety of emotional faces to the person in pain, ranging from distressed to please. This scale is primarily used by doctors with children. In autistic people, the approach has demonstrated to be beneficial.
• Brief pain inventory: This more in-depth written questionnaire can help doctors determine how pain affects a person’s mood, activities, sleep patterns, and interpersonal interactions. It also plots the pain’s progression over time to see if any patterns emerge.
• McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ): The MPQ asks users to choose words from a list of 20 to acquire a better grasp of how they feel in pain. “Tugging, pulling, ripping,” for example, is group 6, whereas “dull, sore, suffering, aching, heavy” is group 9.

For specific advice regarding“ What is Pain”, please visit Simply Align Rehab Physio in Scarborough/Toronto at simplyalignrehab.com or you can always call or text us for your Physiotherapy or Chiropractor needs in Toronto at (416) 628-8554.