type of unpleasant feeling From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pain is a symptom of being hurt or sick. It is a bad sensation that is physical and emotional.
Most pain starts when part of the body is hurt. Nerves in that part send messages through senses to the brain. Those messages tell the brain that the body is being damaged. Pain is not just the message the nerve sends to the brain. It is the bad emotion felt because of that damage.
The message that the nerve sends to the brain is called nociception. What is experienced because of the nociception is pain.
Pain can be acute or chronic. Acute means it only happens a short time. Chronic means the pain lasts a long time.
Pain can be from different types of injury:
Pain can also happen when there is no underlying injury or cause. Pain can happen just because the nerves do not work right. This is called neuropathic pain.
For most pain, the best treatment is to stop the damage that makes the pain. If the ankle is sprained, doctors tell the person not to walk on it. They tell them to put ice on it. This helps the injury stop. For an ulcer in the stomach, doctors stop the acid made in the stomach. This helps the ulcer to heal.
But many kinds of pain also need medicines to feel better. There are many different kinds of medicines for pain:
There are doctors who specialize in pain management. These are usually anesthesiologists but may also have any one of a number of underlying areas of specialization, such as neurology, physiatry, or internal medicine.
A new genetic method of treating chronic pain is in the research stage. The idea is to inactivate (turn off) gene HCN2, which plays a key role in chronic pain. Experiments on mice suggest this will work.[1]
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Every time you click a link to Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Wikiquote in your browser's search results, it will show the modern Wikiwand interface.
Wikiwand extension is a five stars, simple, with minimum permission required to keep your browsing private, safe and transparent.