Assignment Task:
Write a reply to this discussion with a reference article. For this week's last discussion, I have chosen to discuss the topic of pain. Pain is a feeling of discomfort that can be categorized as sensory or emotional experience. Many individuals experience pain in different ways and nearly not the same way. Physiological pain can be associated as a sting, burning, shooting, or aching sensations (Wilcox et al., 2015). Pain is often questioned as subjective and a personalized experience. In an article that I discovered titled, "The subjective Experience of Pain: an FMRI study of Percept-related Models and Function Connectivity", research study suggest that the perception of pain is in fact subjective and dependent on an individual's physical, cognitive and emotional differences. In this article, using a percept-related model, the authors did a study of the brain regions involving pain neuromatrix that are involved in the processing of subjective pain using cold stimuli. The study aimed to identify brain regions that demonstrated a difference in noxious thermal (cold) stimuli, compared to subjective experience (perceptive-relative). In the study, participants were strapped to a table, supine while a cold stimulus was applied to the thenar surface of their right hand, with an MRI thermode attached. Their pain was rated by pressing two buttons with their left hand. Zero being no pain experienced to 10 being worst. The results yield that pain is associated more in regions of the brain during a percept-related, emotional event than stimulus- cold related events (Wilcox et al., 2015). Subjectively, pain is a reaction of injury or a threat of feeling hurt. The development of pain is attributed to three mechanisms of nociceptive, neuropathic and central sensitization, that can act on its own or by combining (Yam et al., 2018). Nociceptive starts from tissue damage where signal receptors transmit nerve signals to the dorsal horn of the spinal cord and the ascending cortical pathways, up to the brain. Neuropathic pain affects the somatosensory nervous system, following nerve cell damage signaling (Yam et al., 2018). Central is the perception of pain represented through no activation of pain receptors. Understanding pain is important and relevant to advanced clinical practice, to eliminate any judgement process that can be bias to not wanting to treat the perception of pain due to opinionated feelings. Key Points: ) Pain is anything that you perceive it to be. ) Pain can be acute or chronic through nociceptive or neuropathic pathways. ) Central pain (perceptive) is the hardest pain to treat due to the bias and judgement, stigmatism of the healthcare field.