Pain Is in the Brain—Not in the Tissues

When do you feel pain?

Have you ever stepped on a nail?  How about put your hand on a hot stove?  Did those things hurt?  Maybe a simply question is did you even slam your finger in a door or a drawer or stub your toe?  More than likely you have answered yes to at least one of these questions.  Now think about those times and ask yourself “did I need to feel that?”  I hope you answered yes.  Especially if you stepped on a nail or put your hand on a hot stove. 

Pain is protection

We need to feel pain.  Pain protects us.  It keeps us alive.  It is our alarm system letting us know that something has happened to our body.  When you feel pain, you react…quickly!  What would happen if you didn’t feel pain?  For a brief moment you might think this is a good thing but it is actually quite dangerous. 

Every year there is a small percentage of babies that are born in the world without the ability to feel pain.  They often get seriously injured early in life and many of them don’t live very long. 

Our nervous system is AMAZING!

The nervous system is made up of hundreds of nerves (400 to be exact), your brain and spinal cord and billions of connections!!  This system is always awake, alert and doing lots of stuff to keep you alive.  Your heart pumps, your lungs breath…all without you needing to make them do these things.  This system has another important function—it is your ALARM system!  That means it will alert you to things that are going wrong with the body.  It will do this quickly. 

Your alarm system

So how does your nervous system protect you?  Well when you do something dangerous, like step on a nail, nerve endings in your foot (called nociceptors) send a loud alarm quickly to your brain.  When that information gets to your brain, you brain has to process it quickly.  At the same time the brain is also taking in information from all around you AND it is going through the rolodex in your brain of past similar sensory experiences.  IF your brain thinks something dangerous just happened at your foot—then it will let you know FAST and the best way for the alarm system to work is to cause you to feel pain.  YES you heard it correctly—your BRAIN is what causes you to feel pain in your foot.  IF your brain doesn’t think it is important…well, then you won’t feel anything.  And you will walk around with a nail in your foot.   So pain is produced by the brain to protect you!

Pain is produced by the brain in response to what the brain perceives is dangerous

You might be asking yourself, can this be true?  Is it really my brain that causes me to feel pain?  The simple answer is YES.  If tissue damage was the reason you experienced pain, well then ALL tissue injury would hurt.  If the brain is the reason you feel pain—well then this explains why there are times your tissue can have an injury and you don’t feel it. 

WHAT??

Well ask yourself, have you ever had a bruise on your body and you didn’t know where you got it?  This is a really great example of you having a tissue injury but experiencing NO pain.  And why?  Because you were probably running out the door to an appointment when you slammed your arm into the door.  Your nociceptors (remember the alarm nerve endings that send messages to your brain about injury) sent the message to your brain but your brain said “don’t worry about that, we need to get to work!”  So you didn’t feel the injury.  The injury is real,  but the pain never happened.  And if you start to think about it, there are probably LOTS of times you have gotten injured in your life and it didn’t hurt. 

Let’s sum up

Pain is real.  Pain is produced by the brain in response to a perceived threat.  And not all tissue injury produces pain.