Biopsychosocial Model Of Pain
In my last blog post, I touched on some of the complicated misconceptions about how pain is dealt with in manual therapy professions, as well as the complexities of the pain experience within the structure of the biopsychosocial model of understanding.
The biggest thing that I have observed is that as a general whole, pain is generally dealt with in the vein of fear, anger and animosity. No one enjoys the unpleasant sensations involved with being in pain. The spectrum can be anywhere from minor annoyance to excruciating and debilitating. It is completely understandable that the emotional toll that an injury or illness can take is far-reaching and in some cases, devastating.
Understanding pain can be the difference of it being fear-inducing …show more content…
There are many subconscious happenings for our daily lives to keep our bodies going, and we generally aren’t aware of most of them. Pain mechanisms, however, are the stimuli that overtly get us to pay attention to and protect our body. Ignoring pain can come with negative consequences.
The amount of pain does not always correlate to the amount of damage to tissues in the body
To put this in perspective, most people with a bulging disk don’t actually feel any discomfort from it at all, and yet you ask someone about how badly their paper cut hurts, and chances are, it’s on a high end of discomfort.
Pain will at times be manifested by the brain to alert you to paying attention to a part of the body that it perceives as being in danger. But on the other side of that, sometimes there is severe tissue damage to the body, and yet, pain isn’t immediately …show more content…
We see this a lot in cases of phantom limb pain (when clients experience pain in a leg or arm, even if they are missing that leg or arm). The brain uses a “virtual body” map to attempt to piece together the information it has received. Sometimes, the brain will use the virtual map to try to determine where the pain is coming from. The pain felt is 100% real, but does not correlate to any new problem within the body.
(For more information about the intricacies of phantom limb pain, check out the latest Massage &Fitness Magazine at https://www.massagefitnessmag.com/)
The brain can actually become “addicted” and sensitized to persistent pain, which causes neural networks to create a larger pain response with less stimulus. This impacts lives significantly.
At this year’s San Diego Pain Summit, Dr. A. Vania Apkarian recently brought out research examining brain scans which showed that “the amount of global information disruption (in the brain) is directly proportional to the amount of pain that the patients are experiencing at that moment. Disruption impacts the WHOLE BRAIN, which means pain disrupts everything that the patients are doing (in their life).” He also brought out that “The brain becomes addicted to nociception inputs. So chronic pain has become a central addictive-circuitry- engaged
The biggest thing that I have observed is that as a general whole, pain is generally dealt with in the vein of fear, anger and animosity. No one enjoys the unpleasant sensations involved with being in pain. The spectrum can be anywhere from minor annoyance to excruciating and debilitating. It is completely understandable that the emotional toll that an injury or illness can take is far-reaching and in some cases, devastating.
Understanding pain can be the difference of it being fear-inducing …show more content…
There are many subconscious happenings for our daily lives to keep our bodies going, and we generally aren’t aware of most of them. Pain mechanisms, however, are the stimuli that overtly get us to pay attention to and protect our body. Ignoring pain can come with negative consequences.
The amount of pain does not always correlate to the amount of damage to tissues in the body
To put this in perspective, most people with a bulging disk don’t actually feel any discomfort from it at all, and yet you ask someone about how badly their paper cut hurts, and chances are, it’s on a high end of discomfort.
Pain will at times be manifested by the brain to alert you to paying attention to a part of the body that it perceives as being in danger. But on the other side of that, sometimes there is severe tissue damage to the body, and yet, pain isn’t immediately …show more content…
We see this a lot in cases of phantom limb pain (when clients experience pain in a leg or arm, even if they are missing that leg or arm). The brain uses a “virtual body” map to attempt to piece together the information it has received. Sometimes, the brain will use the virtual map to try to determine where the pain is coming from. The pain felt is 100% real, but does not correlate to any new problem within the body.
(For more information about the intricacies of phantom limb pain, check out the latest Massage &Fitness Magazine at https://www.massagefitnessmag.com/)
The brain can actually become “addicted” and sensitized to persistent pain, which causes neural networks to create a larger pain response with less stimulus. This impacts lives significantly.
At this year’s San Diego Pain Summit, Dr. A. Vania Apkarian recently brought out research examining brain scans which showed that “the amount of global information disruption (in the brain) is directly proportional to the amount of pain that the patients are experiencing at that moment. Disruption impacts the WHOLE BRAIN, which means pain disrupts everything that the patients are doing (in their life).” He also brought out that “The brain becomes addicted to nociception inputs. So chronic pain has become a central addictive-circuitry- engaged