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Resources to help you understand, prevent, and manage your pain
Resources to help you understand, prevent, and manage your pain
you are not alone!
Chronic pain can feel incredibly isolating, a personal burden you are carrying by yourself. In reality, chronic pain is (tragically) incredibly common across all age groups, averaging to around 43% of the general population!
Fayaz, A et al. “Prevalence of chronic pain in the UK: a systematic review and meta-analysis of population studies.” BMJ open vol. 6,6 e010364. 20 Jun. 2016, doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2015-010364
WHAT IS PAIN ?
If we want to be able to prevent and deal with pain, we first need to understand what it actually is and where it comes from.
Pain is our bodies way of sending us an alarm signal, making us aware of injuries so that we can tend to them, recover, but also learn not to repeat the action that led to getting injured in the first place. It might seem at times that life would be better withot pain, but people born without pain perception (a genetic disorder called CIP) show us otherwise – they have an extremely high mortality rate due to undiscovered injuries leading to their death (be it internal organ damage, broken bones, sepsis, etc.). Small children who can’t feel pain have even been reported to eat their own fingers or toes. Pain is crucial for our survival.
The sensory or physical aspect of pain is also called nociception. When a tissue injury occurs, like a small paper cut, the nerve endings in your skin responsible for the detection of noxious stimuli get activated and relay the signal to the spinal cord. From there the signal travels all the way up to the brain where it gets processed and you perceive it as pain.
Seems simple enough, right? Now in reality pain perception is a lot more complex and the pain signal can be modulated at every step from our skin to the brain.
For example, when we get a sunburn, the damage caused by the UV rays leads to inflammation in the skin. This inflammation makes the sensory fibers in the skin more sensitive, making them respond to non-painful stimuli as if they were harmful injuries, an effect that is called ‘allodynia’. For example, when you’re sunburnt – even light touch becomes painful.
The spinal cord is one of the major sites of pain modulation, as the spinal cord gets input from our whole body and the brain. One example is the ‘gate theory of pain’ originally proposed by Melzack and Wall in 1965. It describes how the transmission of a pain signal to the brain can be interrupted through the incoming touch signal arriving at the spinal cord at the same time. Simply put – when you rub a sore area, it hurts less.
Finally, the brain not only processes the incoming pain signal in various areas, giving the pain we perceive a ‘colour’, or ‘value’ based on previous experiences, our expectations in regards to the pain, our current emotional state. It even has the power to stop the transmission of the pain signal at the level of the spinal cord through connections that travel all the way down. This is the main reason why our mindset surrounding pain is so powerful – we have the power to drastically influence and shape our perception.
MY ambition
Hi there! I’m Kira, a curious neuroscience PhD focused on pain research. I’ve been working in the field of pain research for a good 6 years now, as I got my master’s in neuroscience at the University of Zurich, followed by a research internship at the University of Calgary, and have recently completed my PhD in clinical neuroscience at the University of Oxford. All my projects were in the field of pain research, but looking at pain and painful conditions from different angles – from top-down modulatory circuits to pathologies of the periphery (nerves). One thing that has become clear over the years is the great disparity in knowledge about pain between the research community and the general population. There are so many misconceptions surrounding pain and pain treatment, and even medical doctors are not getting proper training on pain management.
After having attended multiple international conferences to discuss current pain research, it has become quite clear to me that there most likely won’t be a great new ‘cure’ for pain any time soon – at least not in the form of a new pill. But what has picked up a lot in the research community is the involvement of psychosocial interventions to address pain. It is astonishing just how much influence we can have on our own perceived pain. How much of a difference a mindset shift can have on our overall wellbeing. Just knowing what pain acutally is, where it comes from, and how it gets processed can have a huge impact on our relationship to pain.
This is why I want to bridge the gap between current pain research and the rest of the world.
I want to share everything I’ve learned both as a researcher and as a human who’s had to overcome more severe injuries myself. There are so many things I’ve picked up over the years that would’ve made my life so much easier had I learned about them earlier, so I want to share them here for everyone who could use some help themselves.
This is a blog I’m planning to continuously work on – there are so many more topics left to cover!