|
Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience that often starts with an injury or illness. The incoming pain signals trigger specialized nerve cells in your brain to tell your muscles how to respond. (Drop that steaming mug of coffee now! Or, limp because your leg hurts.) This response is only one part of a complex warning system where one alarm sets off another, and the control center works hard to figure out what the problem is all about.
What you feel may have both physical and emotional components. If the pain is severe, your pulse may race, your blood pressure may rise, you may start to sweat and the pupils of your eyes may dilate. Meanwhile, your body pumps out chemicals, among them adrenaline to supply extra energy, and endorphins, your body's natural painkillers. You might become frightened, anxious or annoyed.
Your response is as individual as you are. Pain, even when resulting from the same pain signal, differs in each person. You may even react differently at different times. This uniqueness of pain adds to the difficulty in measuring and treating it. There are two basic types of pain, acute and chronic.
Acute pain
You stub your toe - you yelp in pain. You touch a hot iron - you feel a searing burn. You have your gallbladder removed - you're laid up for days. Whether the pain is mild or severe, lasts minutes or days, in each case and as you heal, the pain goes away. This is acute pain. Most of the time you can take a pill and acute pain is relieved.
Chronic pain
In chronic pain, the pain signals keep firing up the nervous system over an extended period of time from weeks to months, even years, either continually or as flare-ups. The cause may be an ongoing condition like arthritis, an illness like cancer or unknown. Whatever the cause, chronic pain often is intractable. The cause of the pain may not be able to be cured or treated, and the pain itself cannot be relieved. Unrelieved pain may create a vicious cycle. It can make people unable to work, concentrate, socialize, eat properly, sleep or take care of activities of daily living. That in turn may lead to depression, anxiety and frustration, which accentuates the pain and leaves the patient even less able to cope with the normal activities of life.
Living with chronic pain
You don't have to let chronic pain rule your life, you can take control of it. For more information, see Related Articles below.
|
Related Articles
|
|
External Sources
 |
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes.
|
|
Dollinger M, Rosenbaum, EH, Tempero M., et al. Everyone's Guide to Cancer Therapy, Fourth Edition, Kansas City, Missouri: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2002.
|
|
This article was reviewed and updated June 2007.
Return to the previous page
|
