Pain Sensation - Treating The Cause And Not The Symptom
Posted: Wednesday, February 10, 2010
by Olufemi Ladeinde
Rencare Limited
“He who feels it,
knows it." Is a common saying, immortalized in music by the late Bob
Marley, that clearly shows pain as a subjective phenomenon.
Let us take a quick look at pain, the one symptom that we
all wish to avoid if we possibly can. Why do we have so much aversion to pain?
It is the one thing that constantly reminds us of our mortality. Most people do
not mind getting old but they do mind the aches and pains that attend aging. We
must understand however that pain is one of the body’s most useful signals when
things are about to go wrong or, God forbid, have already gone horribly wrong.
The body uses pain as a call to order as well as a call to arms. As pain hits,
the body is mobilising all of its considerable resources to reverse the cause
of the pain and at the same time calls your attention to the possibility of
diminishing supplies of nutrients required for repair or replacement of damaged
tissue or to an activity that is about to cause damage.
We are all familiar with the warning systems in a car. When
a car ignition is turned on a plethora of red lights flash up but as soon as
the engine kicks in the red lights go out one by one as a system check is
carried out and each unit is passed fit. If a unit is unfit, its red light
stays on and it then becomes the responsibility of the driver to find a
solution to the highlighted problem. The body has a similar set up. It is
constantly carrying out systems checks and when it finds a system not up to par
it flashes up a red light – pain.
Pain is unpleasant. It is a sensory and emotional experience
associated with actual or potential tissue damage. Pain may be acute or chronic in nature. There is a great difference between the two. Pain
calls attention to a situation that is life threatening or may become so if care
is not taken. At the time pain hits the damage may not have happened yet and
the signal is an attempt to avoid damage.
Acute pain, for the most part, results from inflammation and
generally comes on suddenly, for example, after trauma or surgery. The cause of
acute pain can usually be diagnosed and treated, for example, an injury that
results in a broken bone. Acute pain is confined to a period of time and
severity while chronic pain persists over a long period of time and is mostly
resistant to medical treatments.
Pain is a unique symptom that changes from one person to
another. It is whatever the sufferer experiencing it says it is because it is
90% perception. Acute pain may
sometimes be stopped by treating the underlying cause. However, if the
underlying cause is “untreatable" the pain may become chronic, causing stress,
anxiety and fear.
Chronic pain is often associated with a long-term or life-threatening
illness. A person experiencing chronic pain may be depressed, withdrawn, and
exhausted. It is easier to understand pain, locate its cause, and treat it by
using physiological explanations for it. This way, pain can be divided into two
types, Nociceptive or Neuropathic. Nociceptive pain can be
somatic or visceral. Somatic pain results from injury to parts of the body like
bones, joints, and soft tissues. Visceral pain comes from inflammation, distension,
or stretching of internal organs. It is not well localized and is often
described as an aching, cramping, deep, or pressure pain.
Examples of visceral pain would include pain in the abdomen
from a bowel obstruction and pain that shoots up the left arm/jaw from an acute
myocardial infarction. Neuropathic pain results from injury to nerves in the
central or peripheral nervous system. Injury to the brain, brain tumors,
diabetic neuropathy (nerve damage due to the effects of diabetes), and herpes zoster
are all examples of conditions that may cause this type of pain. Neuropathic
pain is usually more difficult to treat than nociceptive pain.
Everyone experiences pain at some point. Each person is the
best judge of his or her own pain. Feelings of pain can range from mild and
occasional to severe and constant. Labour or childbirth pain may be mild and
last just a moment, or it may be severe and last for several minutes. In most
cases, acute pain does not last longer than six months and usually disappears
when the underlying cause of pain has been dealt with. If acute pain does not
find relief it may lead to chronic pain. Pain signals could remain active in
the nervous system for weeks, months, or even years. Effects of unrelenting
pain signals include tense muscles, limited mobility, lack of energy, and
possible changes in appetite.
When you first experience pain, it gets your attention and
prompts you to take action to prevent a worsening of the condition or anything
that aggravates the pain. The pain sometimes prompts a visit to the doctor.
Pain interrupts our work, recreation, and relationship with members of the
family. But is gobbling up pain killers
the answer to the problem?
Finding comfort, which most of the time translates to being pain
free, is one of your goals when you are sick and is usually one of the cardinal
goals of the doctor who is treating you for an illness. However, this writer
believes that this is self defeating. The main focus should be locating the
cause of the pain. Once the cause of your pain is found and proper treatment instituted
the pain disappears. In that instance, it has served the useful function of
pointing you in the direction of the injury or illness and further damage is
averted.
If pain comes from an “incurable" illness, for which no
immediate solution can be found, the pain could become harmful. This type of
pain would keep you from normal activity which saps your strength. The
intensity of the signals would seem to increase because the brain becomes more
sensitive to the pain. So your pain feels worse even though the injury or
illness may not be getting any worse.
When you consult a doctor, your goal is to be cured. That should
mean that you want the cause of your pain to be found and removed so that you
can resume normal life without the necessity for further visits to doctor. Unfortunately,
many illnesses do not have simple solutions. Doubly unfortunately doctors have
been so geared towards treating symptoms of diseases like pain that it might
require a huge paradigm shift for them to start looking at finding causes
rather than simply treating symptoms.
Pain killers only block the appreciation of pain, but do
nothing to remove the cause of it. To make matters worse, a lot of the pain
killers now in use are addictive and/or create a problem of having to wean
patients off them when the cause of the pain is eventually found and removed. In
the treatment of chronic pain, the goal is to live as normally as possible. In
this respect, treating chronic pain is similar to managing diabetes or high
blood pressure. If you need to be on pain medicine for a considerable time you
should not desist from finding the cause of the pain and making every effort to
remove it. Therein lays finding health because treating the pain symptom may
mean allowing the underlying damage to continue and become even worse.
thank you for another insightful article written so all can understand. Marijo
