What is Pain? Even Clinicians Struggle to Answer the Question
Addressing pain misconceptions and misinformation
“An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage”
This is how the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) defines pain. The world-renowned pain physiotherapist Lorimer Moseley refers to pain as “a conscious correlate of the implicit perception that tissue is in danger.”
The two definitions above can be simplified even more. Essentially, pain is a perception that your body is in danger of being damaged. It is an output — your brain decides if it is experiencing pain — not an input — pain signals being activated and sent to your brain. Confused? So was I, even as a physical therapist. Most of the healthcare community has a poor understanding of pain.
Like all areas of medicine and physical rehabilitation, understanding pain is always evolving. I will not be able, nor will I try, to cover every aspect of pain. As someone who previously firmly fell in the camp of misinformed, I understand the feelings of frustration when learning pain is more complex than originally believed, much more complex. In some ways learning about pain science is comparable to experiencing the five stages of…
