People feel pain when signals travel through nerve fibres to the brain for interpretation. It is often the result of tissue damage and allows the body to react to and prevent harm.

The experience of pain is different for every person, and there are various ways to feel and describe pain. This variation can, in some cases, make it challenging to define and treat pain.

Pain can be short- or long-term and stay in one place or spread around the body.

Types of Pain:.

• Acute Pain: This type of pain is generally intense and short-lived. It is how the body alerts a person to an injury or localized tissue damage. Treating the underlying injury usually resolves acute pain.

• Chronic Pain: This type of pain lasts far longer than acute pain, and there is often no cure. Chronic pain can be mild or severe. It can also be continuous, such as in arthritis, or intermittent, as with a migraine episode. Intermittent pain occurs on repeated occasions but stops between flares.

There are other, more specialized ways of describing pain. These include:

Neuropathic pain: This pain occurs following injury to the peripheral nerves that connect the brain and spinal cord to the rest of the body. It can feel like electric shocks or cause tenderness, numbness, tingling, or discomfort.

Phantom pain: Phantom pain occurs after the amputation of a limb. It refers to painful sensations that feel as though they are coming from the missing limb.

Central pain: This type of pain often occurs due to infarction, abscesses, tumors, degeneration, or bleeding in the brain and spinal cord. Central pain is ongoing, ranging from mild to extremely severe. People with central pain report burning, aching, and pressing sensations.

Indicators of Pain:

When people with cognitive impairments cannot accurately describe their pain, there can still be clear indicators. These include:

• Restlessness
• Crying
• Moaning and groaning
• Grimacing
• Resistance to care
• Reduced social interactions
• Increased wandering
• Not eating
• Sleeping problems

Doctors will treat different types of pain in different ways. A treatment that is effective against one type of pain may not relieve another.

Treating acute pain often involves taking medication. Often, this type of pain results from an underlying health issue, and treating it may relieve the pain without the need for pain management. Treatment of chronic pain involves drug and non-drug therapies. There are several class of medicines used for pain management. These are to be taken only under doctor’s supervision.