What Is The Purpose of Pain?

Pain is your body’s alarm system.   It tells you something is wrong.  When part of your body is injured or hurt, nerves in that area release chemical signals.  Other nerves send these signals to your brain, where they are recognized.   Pain often tells you that you need to do something.  For example, if you place your hand in extremely hot water, pain signals from your brain make you pull your hand a way.   This type of pain helps protect you. 

Long-lasting pain, such as arthritis pain, is different.  While it tells you something is wrong, it is not as easy to relieve.  If you cannot manage this type of pain, it can disrupt your life.

Acute Pain

What is the worst pain you can remember?  Was it the time you scratched the cornea of your eye?  Was it a kidney stone?  Childbirth?   Rare is the person who has not experienced some beyond-belief episode of pain and misery.   Mercifully, relief finally came.   Your eye healed, the stone was passed, the baby born.  In each of these cases, pain flared up in response to a known cause.   With treatment, or with the body’s healing powers alone, you got better and the pain went away.   Doctors call that kind of pain acute pain.  It is a normal sensation triggered in the nervous system to alert you to possible injury and the need to take care of yourself.   The pain is of brief duration, lasting between a few seconds to three months, and usually has an identifiable physical or organic cause.

Chronic Pain

Chronic pain is different.  Chronic pain persists.  Fiendishly, pain signals keep firing in the nervous system for weeks, even years.  There may have been an initial mishap – a sprained back, a serious infection – from which you have long since recovered.   Or you may be suffering from chronic pain in the absence of any past injury or evidence of damage.   Such pain is called chronic benign pain or chronic nonmalignant pain.  It is a non-life threatening pain that lasts for three months or more. 

When cancer is the ongoing cause of pain, the pain is referred to as chronic malignant pain.