Pain and pain management

Abstract

Pain is an unpleasant subjective experience generally associated with tissue damage. Some of the definitions given below could apply to all sorts of unpleasant experience, and there is little in the words themselves to make it clear quite what is involved. It is only by talking with others about experiences and finding that same word — ‘pain’ — is used to refer to certain kinds of feeling that one can come to have some kind of shared meaning for the word. There is disagreement on the exact range of experiences correctly identified by the word ‘pain’.