Pain: A Clinician's Journey

Abstract

Pain is a percept: it is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience, a product of the brain’s abstraction that might be considered an activity mediated event: the activity being the message and pain the messenger warning of imminent or actual injury or imbalance yet to be avoided or resolved. There are no ‘painful stimuli’ that is stimuli that invariably elicit the perception of pain in all individuals and it is this highly individual and subjective nature of pain that makes it difficult to define and to treat clinically. The key to understanding and therefore appropriate treatment is in deciphering the message. Recognising and respecting the interdependence of both the clinician and researcher in the search for deeper discernment proffers the potential for synergistic evolution in understanding and treatment with the promise of bringing relief to many sufferers of both explained and unexplained pain.

Keywords: Allodynia, Central sensitisation, Chronic pain, Clinical application, Clinical experience, Global syndrome, Idiopathic pain, Neural activity, Neuroplasticity, Occlusion, Orofacial pain, Pain, Patient centred, Persistent pain, Precision medicine, Psychoneuroimmunology, Psychosocial, TMD.