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Acute and chronic pain

The sensation of pain requires no description, as the vast majority of people know what it is. However, there are some individuals who are insensitive to pain. This characteristic is not considered a positive quality from a physiological perspective, as insensitivity to pain or reduced sensitivity to pain deprives a person of the ability to promptly detect malfunctions in the body. This can lead to a person missing the onset of a disease that could be stopped in time. People with low sensitivity and insensitivity to pain can die earlier than is natural.

From a physiological perspective, pain is the body's signal that unhealthy processes are occurring somewhere. Pain is a reflex, a gift from nature, signaling danger—not external, but internal. Ignoring a painful symptom is inappropriate, as it effectively ignores a dangerous process that may be just beginning (acute pain) or has been developing for a long time (chronic pain).

Tolerating acute or chronic pain is unacceptable, as acute pain, despite its short duration, can cause dramatic changes in the body's structures (tissues and organs). With chronic pain, a person who tries to endure it can completely destroy their personality, as enduring chronic pain alters the characteristics of the nervous system, which maintains the human psyche within its natural, healthy boundaries.

The physiology of pain has not yet been fully studied, as the processes that allow a person to abstract themselves from the sensation of pain, relieving the syndrome without any medications, remain unclear. This means it's unclear what analgesic processes are at work within the human body, allowing for temporary relief from the sensation of pain. The processes that cause neurogenic pain remain unexplained, meaning that treating conditions associated with this type of pain remains challenging.

Nerve endings are responsible for pain signals. Damage to these endings, whether due to injury or some biochemical process, sends a signal to the central nervous system (brain) that something is wrong. However, it's not only direct damage to nerve endings that can cause pain.

Impaired nerve conduction, the lack of communication between neurons in the transmission of electrical impulses, can also lead to pain. Very often, impaired conduction in nerve cells creates a situation where damage to a nerve ending occurs in one area of the body, but the pain symptom is felt in a completely different area (body part).

A typical example is compression of the nerve endings in a pair of spinal roots serving the lumbar spine, causing pain to be felt in the knee or foot. This is because the nerve roots terminate in the lumbar spine but originate in the foot, or, along the nerve's course, pain is felt in the knee. Electrical conductivity of the nerve is impaired, and pain develops in the wrong place, as the brain receives a distorted signal about the injury's location.

This is the origin of the problems in treating diseases, when a pain symptom is assessed by its location, and not by its origin and signal transmission.

It's crucial to correctly assess the body's condition at the onset of pain to avoid treatment errors and a failure to achieve recovery. To prevent such errors, the pain symptom is considered in conjunction with possible health problems across various areas, and the underlying cause is addressed rather than the source of the pain.