Pain Perception

[Name of Student]

[Name of Institution]Pain Perception

Thesis Statement

“Pain is an obnoxious sensory and affecting experience that is strongly related to perception”.

Introduction

Pain is of paramount importance to human vitality, warning one of harm and promoting healing of damaged tissues. Despite its omnipotency, pain tends to seem remote to healthy individuals and often evokes skepticism rather than sympathy. The development of maladaptive persistent pain states in response to tissue injury is common, with one in six adults suffering from a chronic pain condition; however, these people are often dismissed as malingerers and hypochondriacs. Even when pain is acknowledged and addressed, its remedy is generally insufficient because the mechanisms responsible for the initiation and persistence of pain are uncertain. Pain has also been the subject of several centuries' worth of legitimate scientific inquiry, and the advancement of our understanding of pain etiology has paralleled a great expansion in our understanding of how the nervous system functions in general. Perception has always been significant in the study of pain and pain management (Nadav, Eliezer, 1980).

The pain can be considered a subcategory of bodily sensations associated with actual or potential harm or expressed in terms of damage. It is therefore essentially a defense mechanism that exploits precisely this purpose, the ways of the limbic system, which give a strong emotional component to pain. For this reason, the perception of pain is very subjective. The nerve pathways activated by biochemical and pain sensations create a series of responses that involve very complex and the endocrine and immune systems. This explains phenomena such as post-operative trauma, that set of phenomena, ie, that incur after prolonged nociceptive stimulation and that basically consist of increased susceptibility to infections, orientation of the catabolic metabolism and homeostatic imbalances. The essay is the result of three authoritative Web sites that are evaluated and analyzed.

Pain receptors or nociceptors are free nerve endings located in the skin, mucous membranes, muscles, joints, periosteum, and in internal organs (David, Paula, Heather, 2000). Sensitivity belong to either end of the non-fleshy fibers that determines the speed of the signals in the central nervous system and gives rise to the distinction between early pain, short and sharp, occurring during the pulse at a higher rate of myelinated fibers. Later, a dull and long-term pain, in the case of signals in non-fleshy fibers occurs. Nociceptors are polymodal receptors can be activated because the stimuli of different nature: mechanical (blow, cut, stab, pinch), thermal (action items hot or cold), chemical (change of concentration of hydrogen ions, the action of histamine, bradykinin and other biologically active substances). Sensitivity threshold nociceptors high, so only a sufficiently strong stimuli cause excitation of primary sensory neurons, for example, the pain threshold to mechanical stimuli by about a thousand times greater than the threshold of tactile sensitivity.

Discussion

Psychology of pain is defined as a specialized field of psychology that applies the principles, tools and techniques and in general all the scientific knowledge developed by it to understand and explain, evaluate and diagnose, treat and modify the ...