Pain, is really any unpleasant bodily sensation produced by illness, accident, or mental suffering. It is a function by the body to tell us something, or it is the reaction to some outside influence. Such as a kick in the groin.

Pain - A complex experience consisting of a physiological or bodily response to a unpleasant stimulus followed by an affective or emotional reaction to that event. 

Pain is a warning mechanism that helps to protect an ourselves by influencing it to withdraw from harm or possible harm. It is above all associated with injury, or the threat of injury, to bodily tissues. The damage to our bodily tissue can not only greatly disable us, but also kill us. Many millions of generations ago, we did not feel pain in the same way as we do now. 

However, some of us, whatever we were, became sensitive to touch and might flinch or flee if we felt something we did not understand. Our sight was also developing as light-sensitive cells clumped together, and eventually became eyes, in a place where they would be more useful, on our heads.

Those among us who were not so sensitive, perhaps became damaged or were eaten by some other developing entity. Those that were warned by these new senses became better survivalists, and passed their genes and these traits onto their progeny, to be developed further. Now we are more than aware that a kick will hurt us.

Because it has an affective, as well as a sensory component, pain is sometimes subjective and difficult to quantify. Subjective means what we, an individuals experience; objectiveness is what we all, as a group, suffer.

Although the basic neuro-anatomic pain receptors develop in the fetus, individual pain responses are discovered, and honed, in early childhood. What we learn from our surroundings nurture us as we are affected by social, cultural, psychological, cognitive, and genetic factors. What we learn shapes our response to pain, and some become more susceptible than others.

The apparent conditioned difference in pain tolerance among people, is therefore learnt or not, as the case maybe. Spot participants may be able to withstand or ignore pain while engaged in a activity, and certain religious practices require participants to endure great pain that seems intolerable to most people. The perception of pain may be exacerbated by non-physical factors such as anxiety, and some pain has no physical cause whatsoever.

An important function of pain is to alert the body to potential damage - nociception. The pain sensation, however, is only one part of the nociceptive response, which can include a rise in blood pressure, an increase in heart rate, and a reflexive withdrawal from the noxious stimulus. Acute pain can arise from breaking a bone or touching a hot surface. 

Two phases are perceived in acute pain: an immediate, intense feeling of short duration, sometimes described as a sharp, pricking sensation, followed by a dull, throbbing sensation. Chronic pain, which is often associated with pathological conditions such as cancer or arthritis, is more difficult to locate and treat. If pain cannot be alleviated, psychological factors such as depression and anxiety can intensify the condition, complicating an already challenging treatment situation.

Mechanoreception ability of an animal to detect and respond to certain kinds of stimuli, notably touch, sound, and changes in pressure or posture, in its environment.

Sensitivity to mechanical stimuli is a common endowment among animals. In addition to mediating the sense of touch, mechanoreception is the function of a number of specialized sense organs, some found only in particular groups of animals. Thus, some mechanoreceptors act to inform the animal of changes in bodily posture, others help detect painful stimuli, and still others serve the sense of hearing.

Slight deformation of any mechanoreceptive nerve cell ending results in electrical changes, called receptor or generator potentials, at the outer surface of the cell; this, in turn, induces the appearance of impulses or spikes, in the associated nerve fiber.

 Laboratory devices such as the cathode-ray oscilloscope are used to record and to observe these electrical events in the study of mechanoreceptors. Beyond this electrophysiological approach, mechanoreceptive functions are also investigated more indirectly, that is, on the basis of behavioral responses to mechanical stimuli. 

These responses include bodily movements, e.g., locomotion, changes in respiration or heartbeat, glandular activity, skin-color changes, and in the case of man, verbal reports of mechanoreceptive sensations. 

The behavioral method sometimes is combined with partial or total surgical elimination of the sense organs involved. Not all the electro-physiologically effective mechanical stimuli evoke a behavioral response; the central nervous system, brain and spinal cord,  acts to screen or to select nerve impulses from receptor neurons.

Man experiences sharp, localized pain as a result of stimulation of  pain spots, or free nerve endings, in the skin, and dull pain, usually difficult to localize, associated with inner organs. The sensory structures of pain spots in the skin differ from other receptors in that they respond to a wide range of harmful - noxious or nociceptive stimuli. 

Excessive stimulation of any kind, e.g., mechanical, thermal, or chemical,  may produce the human experience of pain. Apart from eliciting this subjective feeling of pain, stimulation of pain receptors in the human skin is objectively characterized by such signs of emotional expression as weeping and by efforts to withdraw from the stimulus. 

The reflex withdrawal of his hand from a burning stimulus may begin even before the person becomes conscious of the pain sensation.

Judging from objective criteria, responses to painful stimuli also occur in nonhuman animals, but, of course, any subjective experience of pain sensation cannot be directly reported. Still, the question of painful experience among animals is of considerable interest because investigators (e.g., medical researchers) are often obliged to subject laboratory animals to treatments that would elicit complaints of pain from a man. If a cat's tail is accidentally stepped on, the pitiful screeching and efforts to withdraw are so strikingly similar to human reactions that the observer is led to attribute the experience of pain to the animal. If one treads accidentally on an earthworm and observes the animal's apparently desperate struggles to get free, he might again be inclined to suppose that the worm feels pain. This sort of “mind reading,” however, is inherently uncertain and may be grossly misleading.

The following observations illustrate some of the difficulties in making judgments of the inner experiences of creatures other than man. After the spinal cord of a fish has been cut, the front part of the animal may respond to gentle touch with lively movements, whereas the trunk, the part behind the incision, remains motionless. A light touch to the back part elicits slight movements of the body or fins behind the cut, but the head does not respond. A more intense or painful stimulus, however, for instance, pinching of the tail fin, makes the trunk perform agonized contortions, whereas the front part again remains calm. 

To attribute pain sensation to the painful writhing but neurally isolated, rear end of a fish would fly in the face of evidence that persons with similarly severed spinal cords report absolutely no feeling (pain, pressure, or whatever) below the point at which their cords were cut.

Aversive responses to noxious stimuli nevertheless have a major adaptive role in avoiding bodily injury. Without them, the animal may even become a predator against itself; bats and rats, for instance, chew on their own feet when their limbs are made insensitive by nerve cutting. Some insects normally show no signs of painful experience at all. A dragonfly, for example, may eat much of its own abdomen if its tail end is brought into the mouthparts. Removal of part of the abdomen of a honeybee does not stop the animal's feeding. If the head of a blow-fly, the Phormia,  is cut off, it nevertheless stretches its tubular feeding organ, or proboscis and begins to suck, if its chemo-receptors - labellae,  are brought in touch with a sugar solution; the ingested solution simply flows out at the severed neck.

At any rate, responsiveness to mechanical deformation is a basic property of living matter; even a one-celled organism such as an amoeba shows withdrawal responses to touch. The evolutionary course of mechanoreception in the development of such complex functions as gravity detection and sound-wave reception leaves much room for speculation and scholarly disagreement.

 LISTEN TO A BBC RADIO PROGRAM ON PAIN

Pain - we all know what it feels like, whether it's the short sharp shock of a graze to the knee, or the nagging throb of an arthritic joint. It's an unwelcome sensation, but it's part of being human. Those few born unable to feel pain - the condition is known as congenital analgesia - die young from injuries they never felt, their bodies scarred from head to toe.

Pain is the most common of all symptoms and often requires treatment before its specific cause is known. Pain is both an emotional and a physical experience and is difficult to compare from one person to another. One patient may have a high pain threshold and complain only after the disease process has progressed beyond its early stage, while another with a low pain threshold may complain about pain that would be ignored or tolerated by most people. Pain from any cause can be increased by anxiety, fear, depression, loneliness, and frustration or anger.

Acute pain serves a useful function as a protective mechanism that leads to the removal of the source of the pain, whether it be localized injury or infection. Chronic pain serves a less useful function and is often more difficult to treat. Although acute pain requires immediate attention, its cause is usually easily found, whereas chronic pain complaints may be more vague and difficult to isolate.

The ideal method for treating pain is to eliminate the cause, such as to surgically remove an inflamed structure, to apply hot compresses to a muscle spasm, or to set a fractured bone in a cast. 

Alternatives to drug therapy, such as physical therapy, should be relied on whenever possible. The analgesic drugs most often used to alleviate mild and moderate pain are the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or NSAIDs, such as:

Aspirin, Ibuprofen, acetaminophen, Indomethacin. Bufferin,  Flurbiprofen (Ansaid),    lndomethacin (Indocin), Ketoproten (Orudis)   lbuprofen (Motrin, Nuprin, Advil)    Naproxyn (Naprosyn), or Voltaren.

If these are ineffective, a weak opiate such as codeine, hydrocodone, or oxycodone would be the next choice. These certainly block pain, but do nothing for the underlying causes of chronic pain. They are powerful narcotics. You can build up a tolerance to them and may require a higher dosage for the painkilling effect to continue. People also experience a dulling effect on mental processes. There is also a high risk of addiction. 

Severe pain not controlled by these agents requires a strong opiate such as morphine or meperidine. Because opiates are addictive, their use is controlled by the Controlled Substances Act, and individuals prescribing or dispensing these drugs must register annually with the Drug Enforcement Administration. Each drug is assigned to one of five groups, from schedule I, which includes drugs that have the highest potential for abuse, to schedule V, which includes drugs with a limited dependence-causing potential.

Pain is a message sent along the nerves to tell the brain that something is damaging the body. The brain then sends a message to the muscles or organ to take action - for example, it tells the hand to get away from what's burning it.

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