What to Do About Pain Health Article

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What to Do About Pain

It's a fundamental human instinct: When something hurts, you want it to stop. Relieving pain — the most ancient of medical goals — is still the single most common reason that people see the doctor. The hurt is more than physical. Pain can depress you emotionally, interfere with your ability to work, and prevent you from enjoying someone else's company.

From a scientific point of view, huge strides have been made in understanding pain, and significant advances have been made in the development of new medications and nondrug therapies. Doctors now understand why it hurts when you bang your elbow against a doorjamb or stub your toe. Over the years, researchers have figured out what kind of nerve cells send pain signals to the spinal cord and brain, and where in the brain those signals are received. They also understand how certain drugs work to ease pain. But many questions remain unanswered.

Moreover, pain differs from person to person. Family upbringing, cultural influences, attitude, and past pain experiences interact to shape your individual perception of pain. Although there's a wealth of knowledge about the mechanics of pain in the brain, the nuances of a person's subjective response are still largely unpredictable. Given this complexity, researchers are unlikely to stumble on a magic on/off switch for pain anytime soon.

Instead, pain management strives toward the more attainable goal of minimizing physical discomfort while maximizing functioning. A positive attitude and willingness to work with your doctor can set your care on the road to success. Doctors can draw upon an ever-broadening array of treatments — from acupuncture to analgesics, biofeedback to spinal injections — to help individuals achieve a satisfying quality of life. However, building a pain treatment program can be a little like sewing a patchwork quilt. Because what works well for one person may offer little or no benefit to another, various treatments, like the squares of a quilt, are often tried and discarded, mixed and matched. You and your doctor may have to stitch together several different therapies to create a treatment plan that offers you relief. Ultimately, the best treatment for pain is the treatment that works best for you.

A headache is one of the most common types of pain experienced. With a little trial and error, it is usually possible to find a pain relief method that works for you.

What is pain?

You know what pain is. Everyone does. But defining it in words isn't easy. The word "pain" comes from the Latin word "poena," meaning penalty or punishment, and unfortunately pain still carries that connotation. Medical definitions tend to be circular, relying on words like "discomfort" or "distress" that essentially just say "pain" in some other way. Researchers often use the definition developed by the International Association for the Study of Pain: "Pain is an unpleasant sensory or emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage." John Loeser, a University of Washington physician, has divided pain into four components: detection of damage to human tissue, the brain's perception of that damage, the emotional response to that perception (which he labels "suffering"), and the behaviors in response to those emotions and perceptions.

For most people, particularly people who are feeling pain, the only definition that really matters is that it hurts. Or as two prominent pain researchers wrote several years ago: Pain is "whatever the experiencing person says it is, existing whenever he [or she] says it does."