Pain Relief
Pain is defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage”. Pain is frequently the result of nociception, activity in the nervous system that results from the stimulation of nociceptors (a sensory receptor that sends signals that cause the perception of pain in response to potentially damaging stimulus).
Pain management, also called pain medicine, is the discipline concerned with the relief of pain.
Acute pain, such as occurs with trauma, often has a reversible cause and may require only transient measures and correction of the underlying problem.
In contrast, chronic pain often results from conditions that are difficult to diagnose and treat, and that may take a long time to reverse. It was originally defined as pain that has lasted 6 months or longer. More recently it has been defined as pain that persists longer than the temporal course of natural healing, associated with a particular type of injury or disease process.
Some examples include cancer, neuropathy, and referred pain. Often, pain pathways are set up that continue to transmit the sensation of pain even though the underlying condition or injury that originally caused pain has been healed. In such situations, the pain itself is frequently managed separately from the underlying condition of which it is a symptom, or the goal of treatment is to manage the pain with no treatment of any underlying condition.
Pain management generally benefits from a multidisciplinary approach that includes pharmacologic measures (analgesics such as narcotics or NSAIDs and pain modifiers or pain killers). Read more about pain killers…
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