The concept of pain

Abstract

Abstract Pain has at times been thought to be purely a physiological phenomenon. Ancient writers recognized that emotional factors play a part in pain and this has recently been emphasized. Modern writers, however, have great difficulty in expressing themselves consistently about pain and they tend to subdivide it into a ‘sensation component’ and a ‘reaction component’. This approach is rejected as a semantic error which leads to futher mistakes both in theory and in clinical practice. The basic common factors in pain are held to be (1) description of an unpleasant sensation and (2) the description of the experience in terms of noxious stimuli affecting the body or tissue damage. It is shown how far factor (1) can be futher delimited and how factor (2) is implied if not expressed. Pain can thus be defined operationally as “An unpleasant experience which we primarily associate with tissue damage or describe in terms of tissue damage or both”.