Why you should understand pain
Learning about how pain works is a really good idea if you are pain or if you are a health care professional.
“How you understand a problem dictates how you try to solve it”
This quote is really important as the meaning of the quote catches the basic approach we as humans seek to solve our problems. If our understanding of a problem is wrong or not up to date we may not solve the problem or end up with a suboptimal result. Many people live with pain every day and seek care for many years but without resolving their pain problem. This could lead to an understanding that either you have to live with your pain and nothing can be done or that the treatment you receive may not be the right one for you. In any case, if you keep receiving the same form of treatment why would you expect this form of treatment to work after many years?
Pain is a major problem and persistent or chronic pain poses an enormous financial, personal and societal burden with more than 1.5 billion people estimated to suffer worldwide [1]. Clearly, we still have much to learn in how to deal with pain.
Today, scientific progress happens faster than ever before and our understanding of pain and many other topics changes on a regular basis enabling us to understand ourselves and the world around us much better. Pain is far more complex than originally thought and even though pain is felt in the body, it is actually a biopsychosocial (BPS) phenomenon [2] produced the brain as a protective response to perceived threat [3]. All pain, acute as chronic, is complex and never a direct measure of the state of the tissues [4]. There are many definitions for pain but perhaps one of the better is from Professor Lorimer Moseley:
“Pain is an unpleasant conscious experience produced by the brain when the sum of all the available information suggests that you need to protect a specific part of your body.”
This new understanding and knowledge provide the foundation on how we can offer better care and treatment to people who suffer from pain. By understanding that behind each pain experience there are many mechanisms contributing and is not just an end product of a potential injury we start to be able to explain and treat complex pain problems like phantom limb pain and persistent or chronic pain (video). A brilliant conceptualization of pain, developed by David Butler and Lorimer Moseley, is the Protectometer [5]. In this conceptualization, you experience pain when the quantity of perceived threat reaches a threshold. The perceived threat can come from all domains of the BPS model in varying amount. A thorough explanation on the Protectometer can be found here.
Despite the many scientific advances in our understanding of pain health care is still dominated by a biomedical approach and many health care professionals feel they have inadequate skills addressing the psychosocial factors in the treatment of persistent pain [6]. Treating pain using a biomedical approach increases the risk of harm for the patient and may result in increased sick leave and unhelpful illness perceptions [7+8].
This is the reason why learning more about pain is crucial so that you may provide or receive the best care and treatment possible. Pain biology education is a way to teach patients about the complexity of pain which has been shown to be an effective treatment for pain [9].
We, at Pain Science Taiwan, aim to provide the most up-to-date courses and seminars on pain science and treatment to help you deliver the best possible care for your clients. We also seek to help you find a health care provider who uses a contemporary understanding of pain so that you have the best chances of recovery. The better you understand the problem (pain) the better choices you can make as a health care professional or as a person who suffers from pain.
Ultimately, we hope to help you so that you may provide or receive treatment which restores painless, thoughtless and fearless movement (inspired by the late Louis Gifford).
We hope that we get the opportunity to inspire you.
[1] Global Industry Analysts, Inc. Report, January 10, 2011.
[3] Moseley, G.L. and D.S. Butler, Fifteen Years of Explaining Pain: The Past, Present, and Future. J Pain, 2015. 16(9): p. 807-13.
[4] Wall, P.D. and S.B. McMahon, The relationship of perceived pain to afferent nerve impulses. Trends in Neurosciences, 1986. 9: p. 254-255.
[5] Hunter, J.P., The Explain Pain Handbook: Protectometer by G.L. Moseley and D.S. Butler.
[8] Darlow, B., Dowell, A., Baxter, G.D., Mathieson, F., Perry, M., Dean, S,. The enduring impact of what clinicians say to people with low back pain, Ann Fam Med, 2013. Nov-Dec;11(6):527-34.