How does pain work?

[NewKidOnTheBloc]

hey guys, can someone explain to me how pain works? say i'm walking down the street and my arm gets cut by a sharp tree branch. do the pain receptors in my nervous system go beszerk and send the signal to the brain?

what happens when someone gets knocked out? i was watching the UFC earlier and a guy was knocked out COLD from one punch.

http://www.mma-core.com/videos/_Dan_Henderson_vs_Michael_Bisping_UFC_100?vid=10005554&tid=100


has anyone here thought of becoming a sports physician? it looks like an exciting job.

thanks guys

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[Concubine]

Wikipedia is your friend:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain

Randomness is not.

 

[sisco]

There are two elements to pain. One of them is the actual irritation of the pain fibre, and then there is the central nervous system perception of it. Acute pain is usually from a local irritation, and that's an easier thing to deal with. It responds to a whole host of narcotics and all kinds of other things. Chronic pain means that your pain has been conditioned, and even though the cause of it is no longer there, you still have pain. The best example of that, really, is phantom pain. Take an amputation of a leg; you say, "Gee, my foot is hurting me." You don't have a foot, but your brain doesn't know that. It's been conditioned. That usually does not respond to narcotics. So, it is the acute pain that you have to differentiate from a chronic pain. In one instance, the chronic pain really has to be dealt with in a different way than simply treating fibre. You have to know that there's not a continuing irritation. So for instance, if somebody has low back pain that goes on for six months, even though it's theoretically chronic pain, the cause of it is still there. This is not what we're talking about, but for instance, say you have a patient who has had something happen to them; they have pain, and they get better from that, but they still have the pain. The pathways are open, it's real pain; it's not imaginative, but the treatment becomes very much more difficult, and it is generally not something that we treat with narcotics. Pain is a survival characteristic that humans pertain. Imagine, if something was tearing your leg open, yet you somehow didn't notice because you didn't perceive pain and didn't happen to look down, your leg would be completely destroyed before you had a chance to stop the destruction. Pain aids in human survival.

 

[Jolie South]

Pain is not something that is out there to be sensed like light or sound. There are mechanoreceptors that sense proxies of injury such as protons, inflammatory mediators, and heat. These signals are then sent to the brain for interpretation.

There's a lot more to it than that, but that's the basic gist.

 

[bawer234]

Bisping walked right into it. WAR HENDO!

 

[ChemEngSoonMD]

hey guys, can someone explain to me how pain works? say i'm walking down the street and my arm gets cut by a sharp tree branch. do the pain receptors in my nervous system go beszerk and send the signal to the brain?

what happens when someone gets knocked out? i was watching the UFC earlier and a guy was knocked out COLD from one punch.

http://www.mma-core.com/videos/_Dan_Henderson_vs_Michael_Bisping_UFC_100?vid=10005554&tid=100


has anyone here thought of becoming a sports physician? it looks like an exciting job.

thanks guys

Wikipedia is your friend:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain

Randomness is not.

Bisping walked right into it. WAR HENDO!

Joke: Whats the difference between a medical student and someone who's not? The medical student knows how to Wikipedia!


Also, its funny about how people complain about pain. It is an evolutionary gift that prevents most people from doing ******ed things that might further damage the body. Can you imagine if you accidentally put your hand on a stove and you didn't feel any pain? When would you stop? When you smell the burning flesh? Pain is so amazing, it doesn't even need to reach the brain.

 

[NewKidOnTheBloc]

Also, its funny about how people complain about pain. It is an evolutionary gift that prevents most people from doing ******ed things that might further damage the body. Can you imagine if you accidentally put your hand on a stove and you didn't feel any pain? When would you stop? When you smell the burning flesh? Pain is so amazing, it doesn't even need to reach the brain.

How does it not need to reach the brain? I thought that's how the body works. Doesn't it need to reach the brain in order for people to feel it?

 

[greatnt249]

Also, its funny about how people complain about pain.

If I had chronic pain for no reason, I would complain about it too. Just because it has a function doesn't mean you have to always be happy about it.

How does it not need to reach the brain? I thought that's how the body works. Doesn't it need to reach the brain in order for people to feel it?

Reflexive action does not need to immediately be interpreted by the CNS.

 

[Jolie South]

Reflexive action does not need to immediately be interpreted by the CNS.

Yea, the cutaneous reflex loop connects just the primary afferents with motor neurons to flexors to allow withdrawal without involvement of the hemispheres.

 

[WellWornLad]

How does it not need to reach the brain? I thought that's how the body works. Doesn't it need to reach the brain in order for people to feel it?

It does need to reach the brain for you to "feel" it. It doesn't need to reach the brain for your body to move itself away from painful stimuli. That's why (to use the canonical example) when you touch a hot stove, you'll quickly and reflexively move your hand away from from the stove milliseconds before you feel the actual pain.

Nerves that transmit pain and temperature information are relatively slow, and you don't want to wait for pain to travel to your brain and be processed while something injurious is doing injurious things to your body.

As for "knock outs," no one is really sure but usually is some combination of concussion and a violent twisting of the brain/brainstem on it's axis, causing disruption signaling and thereby unconsciousness. Brain damage, basically.

 

[Dirt]

Will someone please lock this thread?

 

[greatnt249]

Will someone please lock this thread?

Why?

 

[NewKidOnTheBloc]

Will someone please lock this thread?

Why?

I'm just asking a question.

Thanks for the replies guys.

 

[Dirt]

Because this is an hSDN thread.

 

[greatnt249]

Because this is an hSDN thread.

 

[Droopy Snoopy]

Yea, the cutaneous reflex loop connects just the primary afferents with motor neurons to flexors to allow withdrawal without involvement of the hemispheres.

Now there's an answer appropriate to your educational level OP 😉

 

[alainmarsol]

Well, it partly acts as a defense mechanism to protect our bodies. For example, when a child touches a hot stove the pain tells them to pull away.

Pain refers to a physical hurt or disorder. For example, arthritis and cancers can cause pain but of course there are many other conditions that also cause it. A broken bone will cause pain as well. Physical pains can usually be treated by treating the cause of the pain and also by taking pain relievers.

There are over the counter pain relievers such as aspirin and Tylenol that someone might take for a headache or similar problem. More severe problems may require a stronger prescription pain reliever such as Vicodin and morphine.

There are also types of emotional pain that someone feels when they have been abused or lost a loved one. Emotional pain is sometimes a hard one to treat because you have to get to the root of what is causing the pain.
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baignoire jacuzzi

 

[BanBidil]

Step 1: Get Hammer
Step 2: Hit on any digits (fingers)
Step 3: Record data with other hand.
Pain is there mainly to protect your body so you stop doing whats causing it before it causes more problems.

 

[shreypete]

well chemoreceptors (responsible mainly for slow pain; detected by chemical substances that cause pain like K+ ions, acetylcholine, prostaglandins etc.) and mechanoreceptors (responsible mainly for fast pain) should be adressed. And then you have the paleo and neo-spinothalamic tracts (which together make up the anterior spinothalamic tract.) But yeah, these receptors usually send impulses to the brain (usually the somatosensory cortex/postcentral gyrus and the impulses are then projected to the precentral gyrus/motor cortex which sends back impulses through the spinal cord to the lower levels of the body).