Pain explained

If you’re experiencing pain you may go to see your doctor.  And the first question they’re likely to ask is tell me where it hurts.  It might be that you have injured yourself or it could be that the pain is a symptom of an illness.  Either way, the pain is likely to be your body’s way of letting you know that something is wrong.

Now, this signalling function can be really useful for us in all sorts of every day situations.  Put your hand on a hot surface and the immediate sensation of pain means you take your hand away quickly, hopefully before you’ve burnt yourself too badly.  And if you exercise or play sport, pain can be your body’s way of telling you that you’re doing too much and you need to rest for a bit.

But of course, pain isn’t always a mild nagging sensation that’s there to tell us we’ve overdone things in the gym.  Sometimes pain means being in agony and unable to do anything else while the pain lasts.

So if you break your arm for instance, it’s likely to hurt a lot, and this is known as acute pain.  Assuming though that you receive prompt treatment, the arm is still likely to hurt for a while, which has a useful purpose, as it makes sure we don’t do too much while the arm is healing, but once the arm has healed the pain will hopefully have gone and you’ll be back to normal.

However, there are other types of pain.  Pain that goes on for a long time is called persistent or chronic pain, and there are some types of pain that come and go and we call this recurrent or intermittent pain.

And pain is also complex, because it has both a physical side to it, that is the actually injury itself, and also an emotional side.  In other words how we as individuals feel about our pain.  The way any of us experiences pain will be affected by all sorts of things.  For instance the mood we’re in, the culture we’ve been brought up in and so on.  So when the doctor says tell me where it hurts, it can be just the start of a complex process of diagnosis.