Top Tips: Explaining Pain

Key messages

• How you understand and cope with pain affects your pain and well as your life.
• The amount of pain you may be experiencing is NOT necessarily related to the severity of your injury or tissue damage
• When to body thinks it’s in danger it produces pain as a protective mechanism. This is a normal response to what your brain perceives as a threat.

• Pain is a multi-factorial beast; the pain experience of the brain relies on many sensory cues.

Visual person? Watch this short You Tube clip explaining pain or read on...

The process of producing pain

• Danger sensors are located all over the body.

• When the excitement within a neurone (an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information through electrical and chemical signals) reaches the critical level, a message is sent towards the spinal cord.
  
• When a danger message reaches the spinal cord, it causes release of excitatory chemicals.
• Sensors in the danger messenger neuron are activated by said excitatory chemicals and when the excitement level of the danger messenger neurone reaches the critical level… a danger message is sent to the brain.
• The message is processed through the brain. If the brain decides you are in danger and you need to act, it will produce pain.
  
• The brain activates several systems that work together to get you out of danger.

Once the body thinks it is in danger… the acute phase

• Tissue damage causes inflammation which directly activates danger sensors and makes neurons more sensitive.
• Inflammation in the short term promotes healing.
• Tissue healing depends on the blood supply and demands of the tissue involved but all tissues can heal…this is where osteopathy can help, working with fluid mechanics and promoting fluid/blood flow into the area

When the brain takes over in an over-stimulation response …the chronic phase

• When pain persists the danger alarm system becomes more sensitive.
• The danger messenger neurone becomes more excitable and manufactures more sensors for excitatory chemicals and brain starts activating neurones that release excitatory chemicals
• The brain adapts to become better at producing the neuro tag for pain (the pain song)
• Danger sensors in the tissues contribute less and less to the danger message arriving at the brain.

 
This information has been adapted from Moseley and Butler's book “Explain Pain”