Long Term Affect of Pain: Immediate Attention to Pain is Essential.
Pain is real, but the level of pain is perceived and subjective. There are various ways to manage pain, including the use of medication and surgery.
Imagine you are participating in a 10-kilometer marathon. Two weeks prior to the race during a training session, you step in a pothole seriously injuring your ankle. Immediately, you stop running as pain is experienced in the ankle. With each step, excruciating pain is redefined in your ankle, and only begins to subside when the ankle is elevated and ice is applied. Perhaps, medical treatment was not pursued and the ankle remained swollen for three (3) days, during which time no pain medication was taken. Now, two weeks later the marathon is set to commence and the ankle has been wrapped for the race. There is concern that the injury is not completely healed and the pain may re-occur. If so, will the value of the pain be the same or greater?.
Pain may be defined as an unpleasant sensory and/or emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage. The level or magnitude of pain is always subjective. As the marathon runner, you experienced an ankle sprain in training, which created limited tissue damage. The injured ankle could only tolerate marginal weight immediately after the accident. However, to what degree was pain actually apparent? Making a determination of the value of pain is very subjective. Cancer patients may encounter chronic pain, which is often difficult to evaluate. If a cancer patient with chronic pain experienced a similar ankle injury, the value of pain exhibited with the ankle injury would be less than the pain experienced from the cancer. This is due to the tolerance of pain the body has been subjected to and the ability of the receptors to reduce the level of pain. This is only achieved if the pain is located in a different part of the body.
