You bite your tongue during dinner. You slip on the street and open your knees. Or you have muscle pain after a game of football. Pain is part of our lives, whether we want it or not. But why do we actually have pain? NEMO Kennislink delved into five questions to better understand pain.
What is pain?
Pain is an unpleasant feeling in your body. It warns you of possible tissue damage, such as a cut, a broken arm or appendicitis. There are special cells throughout your body that transmit pain signals to your brain. In the brain, a combination of these signals together with your emotions and environment determines whether and how much pain you experience. “Pain is a conscious experience,” explains Monique Steegers, professor of pain medicine and palliative medicine at Amsterdam UMC. “When you are under anesthesia during an operation, nerves still send a signal to the brain in case of tissue damage. We also call this nociception. Yet you do not feel any pain during an operation. Only when the brain judges the situation as dangerous will we experience such signals as painful.”
Thanks to pain, you will rest more, giving your body the chance to recover. The pain often disappears on its own after a few days or weeks. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. When pain lasts longer than three months, the damage in the body is often no longer present. The pain is then chronic. Because there is often no clear cause for chronic pain, it is usually difficult to treat. In the Netherlands, one in five adults has chronic pain.
On average, men have a higher pain threshold than women.
How do painkillers work?
Painkillers stop or reduce pain signals to the brain. Strong painkillers (opioids) such as morphine work in the brain. Here they block receptors of the central nervous system, preventing the signal from being transmitted.
Painkillers in your body do not target the pain. They spread throughout your body, causing some of the painkillers to end up at the site of the pain. How quickly a painkiller works depends on the method of administration. For example, a paracetamol tablet must be taken through the mouth, stomach and intestines before it enters the blood and can therefore reach the right place in the body. An infusion or injection directly into the bloodstream works a lot faster.
Is everyone equally sensitive to pain?
The amount of pain someone experiences varies from person to person and depends on the moment. However, women appear to be on average more sensitive to pain than men. “If you expose women to a painful stimulus, such as a high or low temperature, they will on average be more likely to indicate that it hurts,” says Steegers. According to her, hormones probably play a major role here. For example, the administration of testosterone ensures that women’s pain threshold increases and they therefore feel pain less quickly. “When you have relatively high levels of estrogen in your blood, you are also more sensitive to pain. In women, the amount of estrogen decreases around menstruation, making them – naturally – less sensitive to pain.”
There are also people with very rare conditions who feel no pain at all. That may sound nice, but it is very dangerous. This way they will not feel that they are walking through glass, putting their hand in a burning candle or having a tumor in their body. A well-known example is the American one Gabby Gingras. “She was largely blind at the age of three, because she regularly stuck her finger in her own eyes. She also chewed her fingers and tongue until they bled, because she did not realize that she was damaging herself,” said Steegers. People with these rare conditions often live less long than average because they take time to notice damage to their body.
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Can you teach yourself to have less pain?
According to Steegers, there are a number of things you can do to experience less pain. Exercise is one of the most important things you can do, provided it is clear that it will not cause any additional damage to your body. It is also a good idea to listen to music when in pain. “Listening to your favorite music in particular helps to increase your pain threshold.” Constantly exposing yourself to the same painful stimulus can actually have the opposite effect. “If you fall on your knee several times, the body can react more and more violently. Over time, this can cause long-lasting pain that does not go away.”
Do animals also feel pain?
It will come as no surprise that other mammals – such as your dog, cat or rabbit – can feel pain. They withdraw, lick their wounds and you can often see it on their faces. There is still much debate about other animals, such as fish and insects. For example, it has long been thought that fish do not feel pain because they lack parts of the brain that are responsible for pain processing in mammals. The reaction of fish would mainly be a reflex to avoid damage to the body, without causing fish to suffer. Yet more and more research is appearing that proves the opposite. So it has research demonstrated in 2019 that fish behave differently due to painful stimuli: they move less, adopt a defensive position and breathe faster. When fish were given painkillers, their behavior did not change during painful stimuli. There are also indications that insects feel pain and that they exhibit pain-avoidance behavior, but this is most likely a completely different type of pain. Because they have no brain, they probably cannot consciously experience the pain.
2023-10-19 17:37:52
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