What Is Pain Perception?

What Is Pain Perception?

Introduction

Pain perception is the process by which pain is recognized and interpreted by the brain. We tend to think of pain as an inevitable consequence of stress on or damage to our bodies, flowing from sensory levels to the conscious feeling of ‘’ouch’’. At some point in life, all people experience pain. The presence of pain can prevent further damage to an injured area or even prevent an injury from occurring, but pain that continues, after treatment or even after healing, can be debilitating (Loeser and Melzack, 1999). Humans need pain to aware them to injury and damage to their bodies. Each person may experience different pains in their daily lives. Short-term, or transient pain, serves to protect an individual from any lasting damage. People rarely seek medical care to address their pain symptoms. The pain itself motivates the person to stop the harmful activity to prevent additional pain and damaging injury.

Literature review

Neurons there receive information from the brain, and they form synapses with the neurons that are conveying sensory information from nociceptors to the brain. According to the very influential gate control theory (Melzack and Wall, 1988), the bottom-up pain signals from the nociceptors can be blocked via a feedback circuit located in the dorsal horn. When these gate neurons send excitatory signals, the sensory information is allowed to go through, but inhibitory signals from the gate neurons cancel transmission to the brain. The gate control theory is a description of the pain-transmitting system that incorporates modulating signals from the brain. Pain signals transmitted to the brain are moderated by activity in the substantia gelatinosa located in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord. The transmission cells combine pain signals from the small diameter fibers with signals inhibiting pain produced by stimulation of the large-diameter fibers. Direct excitatory pathways from both types of fibers are also found outside of the SG. As with the large-diameter fibers, the central control excites mechanisms in the SG that inhibit the activation of transmission cells, thus decreasing the pain response.

Conclusion

        Although the theory accounts for sensations that are mainly psychological in nature that is, pain itself as well as some of the psychological factors influencing it its scientific beauty is that it provides a physiological source for the difficult sensation of pain. In the gate control theory, the experience of pain depends on a difficult chemistry of these two systems as they each process pain signals in their own way. Upon injury, pain messages originate in nerves related with the damaged tissue and flow along the peripheral nerves to the spinal cord and on up to the brain. The gate control theory has brought about an extreme revolution in the arena of pain controlling. The theory suggested that pain management can be accomplished by selectively swaying the larger nerve fibers that carry non-pain stimuli. The theory has also paved way for more research on cognitive and behavioral approaches to achieve pain relief.

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