The Facts About Pain:
The International Association of the Study of Pain (the world's most prestigious pain society) defines pain as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential damage or described in terms of such damage".
What was the worst pain you can remember? Was it the time you scratched the cornea of your eye? Was it a kidney stone? Childbirth? Rare is the person who has not experienced some beyond-belief episode of pain and misery. Mercifully, relief came. Your eye healed, the stone was passed, the baby was born. In each of those cases, pain flared up in response to a known cause. With treatment, or with the body's healing powers alone, you got better, and the pain went away. Doctors call that kind of pain acute pain. It is normal sensation triggered in the nervous system to alert you to possible injury and the need to take care of yourself.
Chronic pain is different. Chronic pain persists. Fiendishly, uselessly, pain signals keep firing in the nervous system for weeks, months, even years. There may have been an initial mishap ~ a sprained back, a serious infection ~ from which you've long since recovered. There may be an ongoing cause of pain ~ arthritis, cancer, ear infection. But some people suffer chronic pain in the absence of any past injury or evidence of body damage. Whatever the cause, chronic pain is real, unremitting, and demoralizing ~ the kind of pain New England poet Emily Dickinson had in mind when she wrote;
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"Pain -- has an Element of Blank It cannot recollectWhen it begun -- or if there wereA time when it was not" |
Chronic pain can be defined as pain that lasts more than 3 months or continues beyond the point when that condition should normally have been resolved. A large portion of pain sufferers experience such debilitating pain that it limits their daily activities for at least 1 out of every 3 days.
Pain, as a subjective sensation, has emotional, psychological, and cultural components. We all perceive pain differently. A cultural component in pain is strongly portrayed in comparing the stereotypical behaviors of an excitable Italian or Latin Mom with a stoic British Mom when it comes to dealing with pain in their children. The child of the excitable Mom is more likely to perceive pain intensity to a greater degree and focus on his pain more than the child of the more stoic Mom, who may shrug off the same boo-boo and go on his way.
Pain has also a biological factor that probably is related to the level of production of natural pain killers by different individuals.
A level of dependency is generated by chronic pain patients. This can be sometimes related to secondary gain. We have some patients who live their pain and who have become dependent on their pain for attention or other kind of gain, either real or imaginary.