Facts about Pain

Fast pain travels via type A? fibers to terminate on lamina I (lamina marginalis) of the dorsal horn, which is part of the occipital division of the brain.

An anterior cingulectomy, neurosurgery that disconnects the anterior cingulate gyrus (part of the brain responsible for vocalizing the emotional and motoric functioning), can be used in extreme cases to treat chronic pain.

Despite its unpleasantness, pain is a critical component of the human body's defense system.

Somatic pain originates from ligaments, tendons, bones, blood vessels, and even nerves themselves.

People born with congenital insensitivity to pain usually have short life spans and suffer numerous ailments, such as broken bones, bed sores, and chronic infection.

The gate control theory of pain, proposed by Patrick Wall and Ron Melzack, postulates that pain is "gated" by non-painful stimuli such as vibration.

Visceral pain is extremely difficult to localize, and several injuries to visceral tissue exhibit "referred" pain, where the sensation is localized to an area completely unrelated to the site of injury.

Acute pain is defined as short-term pain or pain with an easily identifiable cause.

A recent survey by the United States National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, also known as NCCAM, found that pain was the most common reason people use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

Pain is a natural part of life and serves the important function of warning the individual organism to disengage from or address the harmful condition associated with the pain.

Visceral pain originates from the body's viscera, or organs.

The scarcity of pain receptors in these areas produces a dull, poorly-localized pain of longer duration than cutaneous pain.

The study of pain has in recent years diverged into many different fields from pharmacology to psychology and neurobiology.

The experience of physiological pain can be grouped according to the source and related nociceptors, or pain detecting neurons.

Slow pain, mediated by slower, unmyelinated ("bare") type C pain fibers that send signals at rates of between one-half to two meters per second, is an aching, throbbing, burning pain.

Some survey respondents may have used CAM to treat more than one of these pain conditions.

Sensitivity to pain varies among individuals (Skovlund et al.

Pain encourages an organism to disengage from the noxious stimulus associated with the pain.

One such alternative traditional Chinese medicine, views pain as a "qi blockage" equivalent to electrical resistance, or as "stagnation of blood"—theorized as dehydration inhibiting metabolism.

Cutaneous pain is caused by injury to the skin or superficial tissues.

Neuropathic pain, or "neuralgia", can occur as a result of injury or disease to the nerve tissue itself.

Pain is also of interest in the search for the neural correlates of consciousness, as pain has many subjective psychological aspects besides the physiological nociception.

Fast pain can be localized easily if A? fibers are stimulated together with tactile receptors.

From the thalamus, the signal travels to the somatosensory cortex in the cerebrum, at which point the individual becomes fully aware of the pain.

An analgesic (colloquially known as a painkiller) is any member of the diverse group of drugs used to relieve pain and to achieve analgesia.

Myocardial ischaemia, which is the loss of blood flow to a part of the heart muscle tissue, is possibly the best known example of referred pain.

Chronic pain, in which the pain becomes pathological rather than beneficial, is an exception to the idea that pain is helpful to survival.

Factors such as obesity and even hair color has been shown to correlate with pain sensitivity as well.

Cutaneous tissue nociceptors terminate just below the skin, producing a well-defined, localized pain of short duration due to the high concentration of nerve endings.

Various drugs, such as acetaminophen or aspirin, can help dull or mask pain.

Slow pain is transmitted via slower type C fibers to laminae II and III of the dorsal horn, together known as the substantia gelatinosa.

Pain can be classified as acute or chronic.

Children have been proven to be markedly more sensitive to pain, but this fact is commonly dismissed as a fear reaction or a lack of coping abilities.

Referred pain can be explained by the findings that pain receptors in the viscera also excite spinal cord neurons that are excited by cutaneous tissue.

Despite its unpleasantness, pain is an important part of the existence of humans and other animals; in fact, it is vital to survival.

Management of pain may be handled in various ways.

The signals are sent to the thalamus (part of brain), in which pain perception occurs.

Three types of pain receptors exist: mechanical, thermal and chemical.

Chronic pain was originally defined as pain that lasts six months or longer.

Interestingly, the brain itself is devoid of nociceptive tissue and therefore cannot experience pain.

Some individuals have the ability to control what and how they think when confronted with pain.

Some causes of pain may be simple to diagnose like a scraped knee from a fall or a muscle ache from intense cardiovascular activity.

Two main types of nociceptors, A? and C fibers, mediate fast and slow pain respectively.

Chemical pain is one example of slow pain.

Phantom limb pain is the sensation of pain from a limb that has been lost or from which a person no longer receives physical signals.

Traditional Chinese treatments such as acupuncture are considered to be more effective for non-traumatic pain than traumatic pain.

Preliminary pain can serve to indicate that an injury is imminent, such as the ache from a soon-to-be-broken bone.

The theory that visceral and somatic pain receptors converge and form synapses (junctions) on the same spinal cord pain-transmitting neurons is called Ruch's Hypothesis.

Deep internal surfaces are weakly supplied with pain receptors and will propagate sensations of chronic, aching pain if tissue damage in these areas is experienced.

Pain may also promote the healing process, since most organisms will protect an injured region in order to avoid further pain.

Some practitioners of various religious disciplines have manifested a remarkable ability to control pain, or to replace pain with a sense of peace and tranquility.

Acute pain often presents itself as fast and sharp and is usually followed by aching pain.

Pain is an unpleasant sensation that may be associated with actual or potential tissue damage and may contain physical and emotional components.

Expert care is generally necessary to treat any pain that has become chronic.

Acute pain is centralized in one area before becoming somewhat spread out.

Analogous motions of an atomic nucleus are described by quantum mechanics.

The perception of pain occurs when nociceptors are stimulated and transmit signals through sensory neurons in the spinal cord.

All pain receptors are free nerve endings, which means they are unspecialized nerve endings that bring information from the external environment to the central nervous system and brain.

Pain is also "gated" by signals that descend from the brain to the spinal cord to suppress (and in other cases enhance) incoming pain information.

The term "Palestine" derives from the word Philistia, the name given by Greek writers to the land of the Philistines, who in the twelfth century B.C.E.

The signals are sent to the thalamus (part of brain), in which pain perception occurs.

The even greater scarcity of nociceptors in these areas produces pain that is usually more aching and of a longer duration than somatic pain.