::... GYNAECOLOGY - Pain

Pain is the body's warning system, alerting you that something is wrong. Pain defines it as an unpleasant experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage to a person's body. Specialized nervous system cells (neurons) that transmit pain signals are found throughout the skin and other body tissues. These cells respond to things such as injury or tissue damage, e.g. when a harmful agent such as a sharp knife comes in contact with your skin, chemical signals travel from neurons in the skin through nerves in the spinal cord to your brain, where they are interpreted as pain.

Pain is classified into two types as acute and chronic.
Acute Pain:
Acute pain, for the most part, results from:

• Disease
• Injury to tissues
• Inflammation

Acute pain generally comes on suddenly, e.g. after trauma or surgery, and may be accompanied by anxiety or emotional distress. The cause of acute pain can usually be diagnosed and treated, and the pain is self-limiting, that is, it is confined to a given period of time and severity. In some rare instances, it can become chronic.
Chronic Pain:
Chronic pain is widely believed to represent disease itself. It can be made much worse by environmental and psychological factors. Chronic pain persists over a longer period of time than acute pain and is resistant to most medical treatments. It can and often does cause severe problems for patients.

Pain medicine, also called pain management, is a branch of medicine that applies science to the reduction of pain. Pain medicine covers a wide spectrum of conditions including Muscle pain, neuropathic pain, cancer pain, postoperative pain and more. Pain medicine takes a systematic and scientific approach to understanding and reducing pain and suffering. The services performed by this branch of medicine include:

• Preventing
• Evaluating
• Treating
• Rehabilitating

For back and neck problems, pain management is generally used either as:

• Conservative therapy, i.e. as a way to try to avoid surgery,
• After surgery, to mitigate post-operative pain.