WHAT IS PAIN?
The IASP (International Association for the Study of the Pain) defines pain as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with a real or potential tissue injury, or described as the one caused by that injury. The pain warns of the existence of a danger , before the sufferer can be injured. It serves to make the patient move, avoid that danger. The goal of pain, therefore, would be “protection and healing”. However, this protection sometimes works strangely.
THE MIND AND THE BODY
The mind and the body are two dimensions that can be distinguished but can not be separated. It’s like a sheet of paper that has an obverse and a reverse. There is no sheet of paper on which you can remove the front and leave only the back. That is why the mind is present not only in what we think and what we feel, but also in what happens in each of the cells and organs of our body.
According to studies carried out over many years by Harvard University, in Boston, between 60% and 80% of the diseases that we suffer, have a direct relationship with the so-called toxic emotions, emotions such as despair, anguish and the feeling of impotence. These types of emotions generate physical damage because they are capable of producing an increase in free radicals, deep disturbances in the hormonal balance and in the dynamics of the chromosomes.
HOW THE ALARM AND PAIN SYSTEM WORKS
The brain receives signals, and interprets a possible situation of danger. Humans have millions of sensors scattered throughout the body , which carry that information to the spinal cord. Depending on the type of sensor, they react to a mechanical force, such as a puncture, temperature, or the presence of chemicals, on the outside or inside the body. When the sensors react to a stimulus (a pinch, acid, temperature increase) these sensors are opened and positively charged particles enter the cell.
The electrical impulses make the journey through our body towards the receptor neurons, which are the ones that will carry this message. Anesthesia, for example, works by canceling the sensors against mechanical stimuli, so the impulses do not reach the spinal cord and there is no pain. These sensors have a short life, are constantly being replaced by new sensors, and therefore the sensitivity of the subject is constantly changing .
Because pain is generated in the brain. When receiving the signal of “danger” of the peripheral nerves, the brain analyzes and processes all the information of our body, the sense of touch, the position of the body, the temperature … and can respond with pain or not, depending on the analysis that you make of all this information and how you evaluate it.
In an instance where someone receives a hammer blow, the brain makes an evaluation of the information that comes to it and tells him that there is damaged tissue in the body. This case is quite obvious, but neuropathic pain is much more complex since considering that the pain starts in the brain, it depends on many aspects of the human being, not only physical but also mental.
We live in a society where our mind receives a lot of information from outside and we rarely pay attention to what happens in our body until we feel the pain. This leads to diseases as common as chronic back pain where a massage feels good at the moment but in the long run the patient will see that it is not the solution.
Therefore it is the brain that “decides” whether we will have pain or not depending on the information (contact, pressure, position of the joints …) that comes from our body.