Pain Education

What is pain?

Please click on the video below to learn about self care.

Pain Education

Run time: 5:56 minutes

You might feel pain in different parts of your body, but did you know that pain always comes from the brain? It does not come from the part of the body that hurts.

• Body parts can only send messages to the brain that something is wrong.
• The brain interprets those messages and creates the experience of pain.
• There are different types of pain:
  • Healthy pain (called nociceptive pain)
  • Pain from damaged nerves (called neuropathic pain)
  • Pain that mostly comes from the brain and spinal cord (called nociplastic pain)
• Treatment looks different depending on which type of pain you have.
• People can have more than one type at the same time.

There are 2 videos below. One explains what pain is and the other explains the mechanisms of pain. Please click on the links and watch both videos.

What is Pain?

Run time: 6:27 minutes

The Mechanisms of Pain

Run time: 8:15 minutes

Pain Types (Mechanisms)

There are 3 ways that lead to the experience of pain. Please read the information below that describes each type of pain.

Nociceptive Pain

• Example of the body responding to a physical event the way it should.
• Warns of a threat and danger to the body.
• Examples: Pain felt when touching a hot stove burner, pain from surgery, pain from tumors.
  • Short-term inflammation (swelling)- the immune system responds to something by causing inflammation, which the brain interprets as painful.
• Most nociceptive pain does not last long
• Helps protect people from acting in ways that may cause injury, like touching a hot stove burner.

Neuropathic Pain

• This is pain that comes from damage to the brain or spinal cord.
• The nervous system delivers the nociceptive message from where the injury is on the body to the brain.
• If the nerves that carry messages to the brain get hurt or damaged, they can fire too much or in ways that aren’t normal.
  • This can be interpreted by the brain as sharp or burning pain.
• Neuropathic pain comes from nerves losing their ability to fire in ways that remind us to be safe (like in nociceptive pain).
• Examples of neuropathic pain: diabetic neuropathy, severed nerves, injury to the brain or spinal cord.

Nociplastic Pain

• Nociplastic pain happens when there is a problem with how the brain reads the signals sent from the nerves in different parts of the body.
  • The brain thinks that there is an injury or damage and produces pain.
• The pain from nociplastic pain feels the same as pain from nociceptive pain- both are “real” pain.
• Risk factors for nociplastic pain: genetics, infections, hormones, physical or emotional trauma, repetitive injuries.
• Examples of nociplastic pain: fibromyalgia, some forms of low back pain, some forms of headache.

Please click on the video below: Treating the Mechanisms

Treating to the Mechanism

Run time: 3:41 minutes

Approaches to Pain Management

• Doctors and other healthcare providers can use different ways to help change how the brain processes pain.
  • Examples: procedures and medicine.
• The person with the best access to your brain is you.
• The best way to manage chronic pain that lasts for months or years is to have a partnership between what your doctor can do (i.e., professional care) and what you can do (i.e., self-care).
• There is a step-by-step way to personalize treatment based on the type of pain you feel at any given time
  • Diagnosis: Step 1 is to think about what type of pain you feel.
  • Education and Self-care: Pain Guide teaches different ways that have been shown to influence how the brain forms the experience of pain.
  • Professional Care: Your doctor may want to include professional care (i.e., medications, procedures, etc.). Professional care can also work to influence how we experience pain. By using Pain Guide, you can have informed conversations with your healthcare provider to create a treatment plan that is right for you.