“Pain is an unpleasant conscious experience that emerges from the brain when the sum of all the available information suggests that you need to protect a particular part of your body” Dr. Lorimer Moseley
Dr. Lorimer Moseley is one of the go to people in the study of pain and in 2008, he was named the outstanding mid-career clinical scientist working in a pain-related field by the International Association for the Study of Pain. Our understanding of pain is constantly changing and will, I suspect, have a major impact on how this then affects the way we treat people. Pain is such a complicated subject and each of us perceives it differently depending on such varied things as past experiences, injury history and the current injury itself all play a part. As such no two people will experience pain in the same way and individuals can feel things differently given different circumstances.
The picture above came from this short piece over at Anatomy & Physiotherapy.com which also contains an excellent short video containing an interview with another pain scientist professor emeritus Ronald Melzack.
While in this link This video will hurt we can see how the power of suggestion can play a big role in pain perception.
This article is more geared towards therapists but still gives a great insight into the porcesses surrounding pain and how we might better help people deal with it.
There is a lot more out there on pain and these few links don’t really scratch the surface but hopefully they’ll give you a little bit better understanding of what’s going on.
