Acute Pain.Com

All of us know it, all of us have experienced it, and all of us have suffered from it: acute pain is a part of human existence pure and simple. So you might assume that as something familiar to everybody it needs no further explanation. Not so. As a matter of fact pain is a highly complex phenomenon that is even difficult to define.

In theory pain is necessary as an indicator of some kind of harm happening to our body. We can prove that by very rare cases of people with an abnormal high threshold to the experience of pain: they have a significantly lower life expectancy than the rest of the population and already go through their childhood with cut tongues, split lips, broken bones, torn tendons and bruised skin - they don’t feel much pain so they don’t care a lot to avoid its causes.

On the other hand pain does not always occur proportionally to the amount of harm happening, as we can see from the excruciating pain a harmless infected tooth may cause or the completely painless initial growth of a deadly cancer.

Pain also is related to a cultural environment and a personal preference. We can prove that in several cultures the reactions to certain types of injury or illness are quite different, and we can see that for certain individuals pain can be part of a pleasant sex life.

So finally if we look at all aspects of pain in all age groups, all cultures, all races and both sexes, we can only conclude that pain is when somebody says it is pain and that pain is as strong as somebody claims that it is.

All the many attempts to measure acute pain on some kind of scale have failed so far. Pain, so it seems, is one of the most radical “subjective” feelings we know.