Do you wonder where pain comes from? It turns out the answer is a little complicated.
Summary:
Chronic pain is influenced by every part of your body. When you talked to doctors who are interested in nerves and pain, it’s a nerve thing. And when you talked to doctors who are focused on behavior, well it’s a behavior thing and it’s really everything.
Your gut and your brain are linked. Most of our serotonin which is always connected in our minds when we think about it with the brain and depression, 80% of that is actually made in the gut.
Pain signals are our body’s way of keeping us safe. Pain keep us out of danger by making sure we don’t run on a broken leg, like an emergency signal.
Chronic pain, though isn’t an emergency signal. The problem is and there’s not acute tissue damage going on but the brain is still sending messages that sound and seem pretty acute and there are a lot of reasons for that. We can probably get some of those later on.
Congratulations on taking another step towards managing your pain. The more we know about pain, the better equipped we are to lead a pain-free life.
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Transcription:
Interviewer: Doctor you’re an expert in dealing with pain certainly a big problem for a lot of people today. Break it down why do we feel pain? What is going on internally that sends that signal that we have pain?
Dr. Heather Tick: Thank you so much for starting such a simple, easy, straightforward question. We don’t really know what’s going on in totality. We talked about it but most of it is theoretical and it changes through the years. So what I’m telling you now that we think is going on is we’ll have more information 5 years from now, probably 2 years from now. We’ll understand we’re really only looking at part of the picture and I guess every one of us comes to it with our own set of interests and biases and so we kind of focused there.
So when you talked to people who are interested in nerves and pain it’s a nerve thing. And when you talked to people who are focused on behavior, well it’s a behavior thing and it’s really everything. So the cells in our body communicate through a large number but a finite number of communication molecules and they all use the same set of communication molecules regardless of which tissue it is. So our nerve cells and our blood cells can produce some of the same things.
Most of our serotonin which is always connected in our minds when we think about it with the brain and depression, 80% of that is actually made in the gut. So we really have to sort of think it is as a whole big ganache, big stew and then think of different components. So pain and the periphery of the body get sensed by these little sense organs called nociceptors and they communicate through the nervous system that goes up the spine. Messages go to the brain, the brain process it in several different areas.
So there’s sensory areas, there’s motor areas, there’s emotional and memory areas that get into the act and there’s probably even more and then it comes back down as a signal through the spinal column. And then there are things that put on the brakes on pain signals and there are other mechanisms that we have that actually turn up the pain signals. Pain is designed to keep us out of danger to make sure we don’t run on a broken leg. Make sure that we get our hand off the fire so it’s an emergency signal.
Chronic pain though isn’t an emergency signal anymore and there’s not acute tissue damage going on but the brain is still sending messages that sound and seem pretty acute and there are a lot of reasons for that. We can probably get some of those later on.
