Understanding Pain

Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience that can provide useful information about potentially harmful stresses placed on your body. If you stub your toe, pain encourages you to check your toe for damage and, if it is bad enough, you may decide to see a medical professional. The pain from you stubbed toe will also make you more careful when walking around your house. In this situation, pain is very useful. It encourages you to act in a way that encourages healing and prevents further damage.

When you first stub your toe the pain can be really intense. This intense pain often only lasts a few minutes to a few hours. Soon after the initial injury your nervous system turns down its sensitivity and your pain reduces. Like every system in our body, occasionally our nervous system malfunctions. When this happens a person can still have high levels of pain even after the damaged tissue has healed. We call this pain persistent pain, or chronic pain.

Having persistent pain can be very frustrating. After seeing several healthcare providers and having expensive and sometimes invasive tests many people still do not get a clear answer about why they have so much pain. Understanding how pain works can help give you those answer and can help get you on the path to recovery. Several studies have even found that simply learning about pain can reduce pain levels and improve activity tolerance.

The first step in our pain program is helping patients get a better understanding of their pain. Below are some of our favorite tools to help you learn more about pain.