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- Dictionarypain/peɪn/
noun
- 1. highly unpleasant physical sensation caused by illness or injury: "she's in great pain" Similar
- 2. great care or trouble: "she took pains to see that everyone ate well" Similar
verb
- 1. cause mental or physical pain to: "it pains me to say this" Similar
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The meaning of PAIN is a localized or generalized unpleasant bodily sensation or complex of sensations that causes mild to severe physical discomfort and emotional distress and typically results from bodily disorder (such as injury or disease); also : the state marked by the presence of such sensations.
Learn the meaning of pain as a noun and a verb, and see how to use it in different contexts. Find synonyms, antonyms, idioms, and collocations with pain.
- Overview
- Early conceptions of pain
- Theories of pain
pain, complex experience consisting of a physiological and a psychological response to a noxious stimulus. Pain is a warning mechanism that protects an organism by influencing it to withdraw from harmful stimuli; it is primarily associated with injury or the threat of injury.
Pain is subjective and difficult to quantify, because it has both an affective and a sensory component. Although the neuroanatomic basis of pain reception develops before birth, individual pain responses are learned in early childhood and are affected by social, cultural, psychological, cognitive, and genetic factors, among others. Those factors account for differences in pain tolerance among humans. Athletes, for example, may be able to withstand or ignore pain while engaged in a sport, and certain religious practices may require participants to endure pain that seems intolerable to most people.
Pain is a physiological and psychological element of human existence, and thus it has been known to humankind since the earliest eras, but the ways in which people respond to and conceive of pain vary dramatically. In certain ancient cultures, for example, pain was deliberately inflicted on individuals as a means of pacifying angry gods. Pain was also seen as a form of punishment, inflicted on humans by gods or demons. In ancient China, pain was thought to arise from an imbalance between the two complementary forces of life, yin and yang. Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates believed that pain is associated with too much or too little of one of the four humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, or black bile). Muslim physician Avicenna believed that pain is a sensation that originated with a change in the physical condition of the body.
Britannica Quiz
Medical understanding of the physiological basis of pain is a comparatively recent development, having emerged in earnest in the 19th century. At that time, various British, German, and French physicians recognized the problem of chronic “pains without lesion” and attributed them to a functional disorder or persistent irritation of the nervous system. German physiologist and comparative anatomist Johannes Peter Müller’s concept of Gemeingefühl, or “cenesthesis,” an individual’s ability to correctly perceive internal sensations, was another of the creative etiologies proposed for pain. American physician and author S. Weir Mitchell observed Civil War soldiers afflicted with causalgia (constant burning pain; later known as complex regional pain syndrome), phantom limb pain, and other painful conditions long after their original wounds had healed. Despite the odd and often hostile behaviour of his patients, Mitchell was convinced of the reality of their physical suffering.
By the late 1800s the development of specific diagnostic tests and the identification of specific signs of pain were beginning to redefine the practice of neurology, leaving little room for chronic pains that could not be explained in the absence of other physiological symptoms. At the same time, practitioners of psychiatry and the emerging field of psychoanalysis found that “hysterical” pains offered potential insights into mental and emotional disease. The contributions of individuals such as English physiologist Sir Charles Scott Sherrington supported the concept of specificity, according to which “real” pain was a direct one-to-one response to a specific noxious stimulus. Sherrington introduced the term nociception to describe the pain response to such stimuli. Specificity theory suggested that individuals who reported pain in the absence of an evident cause were delusional, neurotically obsessed, or malingering (often the conclusion of military surgeons or those treating workmen’s compensation cases). Another theory, which was popular with psychologists at the time but was soon after abandoned, was intensive pain theory, in which pain was considered to be an emotional state, incited by unusually intense stimuli.
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In the 1890s German neurologist Alfred Goldscheider endorsed Sherrington’s insistence that the central nervous system integrates inputs from the periphery. Goldscheider proposed that pain is a result of the brain’s recognition of spatial and temporal patterns of sensation. French surgeon René Leriche, who worked with injured soldiers during World War I, suggested that a nerve injury that damages the myelin sheath surrounding the sympathetic nerves (the nerves involved in the fight-or-flight response) might lead to sensations of pain in response to normal stimuli and internal physiological activity. American neurologist William K. Livingston, who worked with patients with industrial injuries in the 1930s, diagrammed a feedback loop within the nervous system, which he described as a “vicious circle.” Livingston theorized that severe lasting pain induces functional and organic changes in the nervous system, thereby producing a chronic pain state.
The various theories on pain, however, were largely ignored until World War II, when organized teams of clinicians began to observe and treat large numbers of individuals with similar injuries. In the 1950s American anesthesiologist Henry K. Beecher, using his experiences of treating civilian patients and wartime casualties, found that soldiers with serious wounds frequently seemed to be in much less pain than civilian surgical patients. Beecher concluded that pain is the result of a fusion of physical sensation with a cognitive and emotional “reaction component.” Thus, the mental context of pain is important. Pain for the surgical patient meant a disruption of normal life and fears of serious illness, whereas pain for the wounded soldier meant release from the battlefield and an increased chance of survival. Therefore, the assumptions of specificity theory, which were based on laboratory experiments in which the reaction component was relatively neutral, could not be applied to the understanding of clinical pain. Beecher’s conclusions were supported by the work of American anesthesiologist John Bonica, who in his book The Management of Pain (1953) considered clinical pain to include both physiological and psychological components.
Pain is a distressing feeling often caused by intense or damaging stimuli. The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage." [1]
Apr 5, 2021 · Pain is an uncomfortable sensation in the body caused by activation of the nervous system. Learn about the different types of pain, such as acute, chronic, nociceptive, and neuropathic, and how to diagnose and treat them.
noun. physical suffering or distress, as due to injury, illness, etc. Synonyms: torment, misery, torture. a distressing sensation in a particular part of the body: a back pain. Synonyms: stitch, twinge, pang, torment, misery, torture. mental or emotional suffering or torment: I am sorry my news causes you such pain.
Learn the meaning of pain as a noun and a verb, with synonyms and translations. Find out how to use pain in sentences and expressions related to physical or mental suffering.
