Is pain a perception or an experience? It’s my opinion that by calling my pain a “perception”, we are further driving the stigma surrounding people in pain. To read more about the stigma surrounding pain, check out these articles HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE. The short of it, is that people with pain are thought to be weak, they’re just not able to cope with life’s problems, and that it’s a cry for attention. This can lead to social withdrawal, depression, and other secondary effects that may further drive their pain. It’s a vicious circle.

Perception is defined as “the…

Sticks and stones may break my bones, and the words my clinician uses can also hurt me. Sounds crazy, but it’s not. Whether you’re into pain science or not, we’re all probably familiar with the placebo effect to some extent. We’ve all heard stories about someone receiving a sham treatment and getting the same benefit as the actual treatment, like acupuncture for example(1). What I find really fascinating is that the placebo response isn’t some mystical phenomenon, we can explain why it’s happening. We’ve all heard of morphine as an extremely potent pain killer. Did you know our bodies are…

There seems to be a lot of confusion with regard to nociception and pain. These two are constantly used synonymously when, in reality, they are different than one another. To explain this, we need to start from the beginning and explain what nociception is and how it works. Nociceptors, commonly (although incorrectly) referred to as “pain cells”, are free nerve endings that transduce noxious, a fancy way of saying potentially harmful, stimuli and send a “danger” message to the spinal cord, where it gets relayed up to the brain. It is extremely important to realize that the danger message that…