Word: paines
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Specialists in these related sciences have begun to seek a common language to describe the many varieties of pain, to chart its pathways from the burned finger or the stubbed toe to the brain, to assess its total impact, and to find better ways of relieving it. Mind doctors and body doctors are at last recognizing that in their evolving concern with pain they are really talking about the same thing in different terms. Increasingly, they realize that even the most obviously real and physical pain, as from a burn or a fracture, is processed in the mind...
Thick and Thin. First, researchers must answer a basic question: how is pain felt? As long ago as 1826, Johannes Peter Müller promulgated the "law of specific nerve energies." He suggested that stimulation of specific pain receptors in the skin, like those for heat or pressure, sends impulses along specific nerve fibers to equally specific parts of the spinal cord and brain. This concept has since been called the "direct telephone-line system." The latest research shows that the system is by no means so simple as direct dialing. It is full of crossovers and redundancies, creating...
Even the slightest, sharpest pinprick or the pulling of a single hair activates not one nerve fiber but many. Any one fiber, it appears, may be sensitive to more than one kind of painful stimulus. The fibers are not all alike but fall into two main classes, some that are microscopically thin and others that are relatively thick. The fine-fiber circuits can actuate the heavy-fiber circuits, which may reinforce or prolong the sensation of pain. So charting the pathways of pain-from the surface pinprick through the relays of the nervous system to parts of the brain where...
...journey toward the brain. Along the way it triggers an automatic reflex that causes the man to flinch and tighten his gluteal muscle. After the impulse reaches the thalamus, a major (and evolutionally ancient) junction box at the base of the brain, where it is perceived as pain, it proceeds to the cortex. Only in this, the newest and most advanced part of the brain, is the entire painful sensation fully processed and interpreted...
...interpreted depends as much on the pained as on the pain. For in most everyday situations, the emotional component is more significant than the underlying sensation. A man getting a penicillin shot knows that "it's for his own good" and accepts the little stab without protest. A four-year-old who cannot grasp this concept will probably scream. The adult will almost certainly make some vocal protest if he is taken unawares, and he may do so at the first touch of the dentist's drill if he has been expecting it to hurt. Both surprise...