The pain is based primarily on the patient’s feelings, which makes it difficult to quantify and qualify. Moreover, it is not systematically linked to an injury, a characteristic that further complicates its study. A proper treatment with the Balance CBD usage can surely be useful in this matter.
The Aspect of Pain
It is nevertheless possible to describe the path of painful information in the body, with the example of acute pain caused by a hand inadvertently placed on a hot plate: the burn will stimulate nerve endings, localized at the level of the skin in this case, but found in other tissues (muscles, joints, viscera). From there, the information will spread along the nociceptive nerves to be transmitted to the spinal cord and then to the brain.
The Travel of the Pain
It is only once arrived at the brain that the signal is identified as a pain, and that we have pain. However, even before this decryption of the pain signal, the hand was released from the heat source through a reflex arc located within the spinal cord. It is also at this level that the first modulation systems of pain intervene. Involving the neurotransmitter GABA or endomorphins, they reduce the pain felt. Unfortunately, under certain conditions, other endogenous systems may, on the contrary, exacerbate the painful information.
Acute pain therefore plays an alarming role that will allow the body to react and protect itself against a mechanical, chemical or thermal stimulus. But when the pain is chronic, this alarm mechanism is no longer justified: the pain becomes in this case an illness in its own right.
Congenital insensitivity to pain syndrome (CDIS)
Very rare, pain insensitivity syndrome (ICD) is characterized by an absence, or a very strong decrease in pain sensation, since birth. This genetic disease causes most of the time an attack of nerve fibers transmitting painful information. The study of the rare cases of patients with this disease allows researchers – by elucidating the mechanisms of absence of pain – to improve the understanding of normal pain.
Chest pain pictogram Inflammatory, neuropathic or mixed pain?
Dorsal spinal ganglion cut after sciatic nerve injury: in blue (DAPI) non-neuronal cell nuclei and in more clear neuronal, in red neuronal staining with anti-phospho-NKCC1 antibody.
There are usually two categories of pain, acute and chronic, depending on their duration. The acute pain is intense, but often brief. It’s the one you feel when you cut your finger, for example. The pain is called chronic (or pathological) , when the pain sensation exceeds three months and becomes recurrent. This category includes some muscle pain, migraines or pain associated with nerve damage.
Different forms of pain can also be distinguished according to the physiological mechanisms involved:
- Inflammatory pain covers all the pains associated with the phenomena of inflammation (it is often articular pains),
- Neuropathic pain is associated with damage to the central and peripheral nervous system (lesions of the spinal cord, sciatic nerve),
- Mixed pain combines an inflammatory component and a neuropathic component, as in lumbosciatica. These pains are often encountered in the context of cancer or after surgery.
In some cases, such as fibromyalgia, intestinal functional disorders, no lesion (inflammatory or neurological) can be identified: the mechanisms of these pains are still poorly understood. The term dysfunctional pain has been proposed to name them because these pains could be related to dysfunctions of endogenous pain modulation systems. With CBD the proper addressing of the issue can be there.
