Are you in any pain right now? If so, can you point to the location of your pain? And how would you describe your pain level on a scale from one to 10?
Those seem like questions anyone should be able to answer, right? But they’re more complicated than they seem. We’ve all experienced pain, but describing it to another person, even a healthcare worker, can be incredibly difficult. After all, pain can be a burning, stinging, stabbing, or scratching feeling. It can be aching, throbbing, cramping, or electric. It can be steady, pulsating, or come and go throughout the day. It can be localized to the joint of a finger, or it can be somewhere in your abdomen and feel impossible to pinpoint. Pain can feel like a level 10 one minute and an “I’m not sure, maybe a six” the next.
What Is Pain? explains precisely why these simple-sounding questions are so difficult for us to answer. In 12 fascinating lectures, Theanne Griffith, PhD, takes us far beneath our common misconceptions about pain all the way down to the molecular level. You’ll be surprised to learn exactly what’s happening when that hammer hits your finger or when inflammation in the gut causes you to double over.
Not too long ago, medical professionals thought pain was the result of tissue damage—pure and simple. The medical goal was to heal the tissue and subdue the pain. Given the knowledge of the day, that simplistic model made sense. But, today, we have a much more complex understanding of pain thanks to the sophisticated brain imagery of MRIs and PET scans, a deeper understanding of neurons and neurochemicals, discovery of the immune system’s relationship to pain, advances in genetics, and more.
As you’ll learn in this course, our bodies possess nociceptors, which are specialized sensory neurons that have evolved to detect potentially harmful stimuli. Located in the skin, muscles, joints, and even internal organs, the nociceptors are activated and send signals through the spinal cord to the brainstem and higher brain centers. But no matter what signals your nociceptors are sending, your brain determines your perception of pain. That’s because pain is a conscious experience that encompasses sensory, emotional, cognitive, and social components.
