Pain is a psychological condition, that occurs due to extremely strong or damaging impacts on the organism, threatening its existence and functioning. Pain is one of the most valuable results of evolution. It plays an important role in showing symptoms of a damaged function of physiological processes, seeing as a big amount of pathological processes in a human organism show their first sign as pain, ever before any external signs appear.
From an emotional point of view, the feeling of pain has an upsetting character, sometimes suffering; it is a stimulus for a different scale of defence mechanisms aimed at removing any internal or external sources causing this feeling.
Feelings of pain originate in the central nervous system by connecting processes starting in the skin receptors or internal organs with cortical processes in the brain’s hemispheres. There, the impulses travel through special tracts in the subcortical system of the brain and enter a dynamic interaction with cortical processes in the brain’s hemispheres.
A reaction to pain presents as the strongest and most inert unconditional reaction.
The feeling of pain is influenced by higher psychological processes, which have an association with the functioning of the brain cortex and depend on such personality traits as focus, beliefs, orientational value etc. There are many examples of bravery, the ability to tolerate and resist pain, and to act based on higher moral motives, as well as, on the contrary, about cowardice and focusing on the pain.
Pain is considered as one of the borderline situations. (source: wikipedia)
Back pain is best described in the definition provided by the International Association for the Study of Pain (ISAP), which states:
“Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage. Pain is always subjective.”
