How to Relieve Pain, Part 1

Part 1: Feeling Pain.

Pain relief is a fairly simple process--that is, it can only be generally done in one of two ways. You can either reduce (or eliminate) the nerve impulse that is "causing" the pain, or you can increase a competing nerve impulse. Unlike other senses like vision or hearing, touch is almost 100% singular in its channeling. In other words, even amidst a flurry of conversations, we can often hear our name when mentioned in a distant conversation without even being explicitly directed towards us. Peripheral vision is perhaps an even more obvious example of being able to sense things beyond our direct focus.

Pain, however, is a purely survival sense. The principle is that you are in pain because some part of your body is in imminent danger of destruction. Pain is supposed to be the signal that causes you to retreat from the source that is causing it.

Interestingly, the automated portion of our brain that deals with pain sense places priority on the area that it believes in the greatest amount of danger based on what we think "hurts most." More interesting, from a scientific perspective, is that beyond the thing that hurts most, our brain barely registers any other pain that might be occurring. It functions kind like that almost clinically-obsessive person who cannot leave his current task unfinished while moving onto another. Pain is not a great juggler. In most cases, this is a great asset.

In my case, for example, I have a tremendously heightened tolerance for "normal" aches and pains. Things that would probably bother me much more are hardly noticeable. OK, the trade-off is that I am in constant pain (aka "relentless agony"), but this actually works to my advantage to let me function somewhat normally. Because the pain from my disorder come from the same area in my body (my chest/upper-abdomen) and is always the worst pain I am feeling, it made it easier for doctors to treat it.

This brings me back to the original focus: how do you relieve pain?

Of course, the answer will depend on what is causing the pain and which part of the body is affected. Although nerves transmit the pain signals, it is rarely the nerves themselves that are the affected area. Damaged tissue is the most common cause... a laceration on the skin or a blunt trauma that breaks a bone or a tear of a ligament... which then triggers a pain signal to race to the brain along a peripheral nerve to the spinal cord and then up to the sensory cortex of the brain. It is rarer, but sometimes, a nerve cell can also be damaged and then trigger the impulse directly. It is commonly believed that nerve pain is the "worst" pain to experience. This phenomenon may be akin to the idea of you getting hurt and then telling a friend to relay your pain to you doctor versus telling the doctor yourself. It also may be that nerve pain tends to take longer to heal.

Next blog: "How to Relieve Pain, Part 2" (On or about Sunday, February 12th)