Each person’s pain

We have all gone through situations in which pain has appeared in our daily life, disordering our life quality and mental peace.  That’s how we know it is a feeling very hard to define and even harder to express to others regarding its intensity, characteristics, etc.  It is an untransferable and personal experience. But, what makes pain such a special feeling?  Can medicine, so attached to its biological-material criteria explain pain in all its dramatic complexity?

“In this simple or mechanical perspective that has proliferated lately –states Prof. José Flórez Lozano–, it is considered that illness and tissue damage, produce pain and this triggers the behavior of pain.  However, this simple model is not proper for understanding the complex states of pain (facial pain, trigeminal neuralgia, glossopharyngeal neuralgia, postherpetic neuralgia, atypical facial pain, etc).” (*)

For the specialist, if we would stay with that conception we couldn’t at all explain the positive effects achieved by the placebo and other psychological treatments.  Therefore, we must admit the existence of pain of the “psychogenic” type or even “imaginary”.

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