Characteristics & Factors Affecting Pain

The very word pain has a negative connotation. For many people, pain is their worst fear. However, despite how horrible it can be, pain plays an important part in human health and healing. Pain functions to let people know about dangers and problems so they can attend to them. Pain also acts as a guide to how serious an issue is and through subsiding, indicates the progression of healing. Of course, for some individuals, pain becomes chronic and unhelpful in any way. For those dealing with pain of any kind, it can help to understand the four categories of pain.

Somatic Pain

• When a bug bites you, a bee stings, you hit your "funny bone" or you're reeling from a toothache, you're experiencing somatic pain. Somatic pain comes from skin, muscle, joints, bones and ligaments. Some clinicians and textbooks refer to it as musculoskeletal pain, which is a good general descriptor of the systems responsible for somatic pain. Your body uses somatic pain to alert your brain to injuries and traumas to the outer parts of your body. Besides the obvious cuts, scrapes and broken bones, somatic pain can include infection, surgical wounds and headaches. Normally, healing relieves somatic pain, as do painkilling drugs such as aspirin, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), topical anesthetics, muscle relaxants and opiates.

Visceral Pain

• Anyone who has undergone major surgery understands visceral pain. It's a dull ache inside the body that can also trigger sympathetic reactions in the back, neck and buttocks. That hollow ache is also sometimes described as a colic-like feeling in the guts. Visceral pain occurs when damage is done to the inside of the body and its major cavities: the thorax (heart and lungs), abdomen (liver, kidneys, spleen and bowels), and pelvis (bladder, uterus and ovaries). Surgery is a common cause of visceral pain as is major trauma such as an accident or a beating. The damaging effects of cancer on internal organs can also trigger visceral pain. Typically, physicians use opiate drugs such as hydrocodone, codeine and morphine to alleviate it.

Neuropathic Pain

• Neuropathic pain is the most difficult kind of pain to prevent and treat. It comes from the nervous system itself. Slipped discs, pinched nerves, nerve damage and spinal injury can cause nerves to stop doing their jobs correctly. Occasionally viral infections like shingles can cause this kind of nerve damage as well. Instead of firing off electrical signals to trigger somatic or visceral pain as they're supposed to do, damaged nerves send signals for no reason and at random moments. This can result in anything from sharp pain to tingles. Neuropathic pain often results in chronic pain. Because nerves cannot be cured or treated, physicians can only help alleviate this kind of pain through pain medications and nerve block treatments. Patients have to hope nerves will heal themselves.

Sympathetic Pain

• You may have experienced sympathetic pain when you were a child and your sibling or friend was sick or injured. Kids who are perfectly fine sometimes develop pains similar to those of another child close to them. Sympathetic pains occur when parts of the body act in sympathy with each other. For example, colon surgery that creates visceral pain may also cause muscles in the back and neck to tense up or throb as well even though they aren't injured, and nothing is wrong with them. The shock of the visceral pain causes them to become hyperactive and unfortunately for the patient, create more pain.