I believe that the more someone knows about pain the better they will be at developing an effective chronic pain management plan. In order to understand pain management we need to understand the concept of pain.  I propose the following.  Pain is basically a signal from the body to the brain telling us that something is wrong.  There are three components of pain—biological, psychological, and social/cultural. Below I have a very brief overview of the human pain system.

Pain Receptors and Circuits

The human brain and nervous system have pain receptors, which respond to the pain where it occurs in the body.  There are also pain circuits (sometimes these circuits are called neuropathways) that transmit pain signals from the local site of the pain, to the spinal cord, and then to the brain itself.  As the pain signal moves along its primary circuit or pathway, other secondary pain neurons are activated creating a wide variety of different types of pain signals. 

Some of these signals simply report the presence of pain (I hurt or I don’t hurt).  Other signals report the intensity of the pain (it hurts a little or it hurts a lot).  Still other pain signals report the location of the pain (my stomach hurts) and whether the pain is associated with an internal or external injury (my stomach hurts deep in my gut or the skin on my stomach hurts).  Other pain signals report the type of pain (it burns or it throbs). 

All of these different pain signals are transmitted into the spinal cord through nerve pathways.  There the pathways transmit the pain signal information to other specialized pain neurons, which in turn send the information to different areas in the brain.

Certain types of pain will activate an automatic protective reflex (I suddenly pull my hand away from the hot handle of a frying pan without thinking about it).  Other types of pain burst into conscious awareness prompting the person to try and figure out what is wrong.

Anticipation of Pain Affects How Pain Is Experienced

The anticipation of an expected pain level can influence the degree to which pain is experienced.  In some cases, when the anticipatory level of pain expectation is lowered, the brain responds by influencing special neurons.  This renders the brain less responsive to an incoming pain signal.  This is the rationale for using biofeedback and meditation as chronic pain management modalities.  In any event, both ascending (pain signals coming from the point of injury to the brain) and descending nerve pathways (signals from the brain to the point of injury) will influence or modify the effects on the body.

In 2007 I published an article titled Coping with Anticipatory Pain that is on our Article Archive. In July 2009, I decided to publish a new article titled Moving Beyond Anticipatory Pain for Effective Chronic Pain Management, that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you or a loved one is undergoing chronic pain management, especially if you’re in recovery or believe you may have a medication or other mental health problem and you want to learn more effective chronic pain management tools, please go to our Publications page and check out my books; especially the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. To purchase this book please Click Here.

To read the latest issue of Chronic Pain Solutions Newsletter please Click here. If you want to sign up for the newsletter, please Click here and input your name and email address. You will then recieve an autoresponse email that you need to reply to in order to finalize enrollment.

To learn about my upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page.