What is pain?
Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such
... [Show More] damage
What is nociception?
Nociception is the neural process of encoding noxious stimuli
What are nociceptors?
A high-threshold sensory receptor of the peripheral somatosensory nervous system that is capable of transducing and encoding noxious stimuli
What is the visual analogue scale (VAS)?
A measurement instrument that tries to assess the intensity of various symptoms.
The two different visual analog scale rating scales?
Numerical Rating Scale: 0 through 10
No pain: 0
Worst Pain: 10
Wong-Baker Faces Pain Rating Scale:
Smiley face: 0
Crying face: 10
How many people are impacted by pain annually?
1116,000,000 people
Annual cost of pain in the United States
$560 to $635 billion dollars annually
Added health care costs and lost productivity
What did Dr. Phil Pizzo (IOM panel chair) and his committee conclude?
Pain in America a public health crisis
The treatment is a moral imperative
Pain is a medical concern that needs a "cultural transformation" in the way that pain is viewed, assessed and treated.
What is Chronic pain?
So there is no operational definition of chronic pain!
Chronic pain is almost always defined in terms of time, usually 3 to 6 months
Specificity theory
Specificity theory says that specific pain receptors transmit signals to a "pain center" in the brain that produces the perception of pain.
There are specific pain receptors; this theory requires nociceptors
Intensity theory
Intensity theory says that all of the senory neurons are capable of encoding stimulus and it is able to be decode by the brain. Action potential depend on how many fire - hints the intensity.
All receptors are the same; so this theory doesn't require nociceptors
Labeled Line Code
Labeled line coding is based on two ideas: Each sense (vision, touch, taste) has neurons, called receptors, that are especially sensitive to a narrow range of stimuli: their adequate stimulus. [Show Less]