Pain Medicine at a Glance

Formally defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience which we primarily associate with tissue damage or describe in terms of tissue damage, or both"1, pain has an enormous impact on clinical outcomes. This formal definition captures several important aspects of pain: first, it is unpleasant, meaning that most people strongly prefer pain relief to continued pain. Second, pain is a sensory AND emotional experience, which means that pain has both sensory-discriminative qualities, i.e. descriptive features such as burning or stabbing; as well as unpleasantness, i.e. aspects that pertain to suffering (Figure 1). The unpleasantness of pain profoundly motivates most people to seek relief. The suffering associated with pain motivated Epicurean philosophers (300 BCE) to observe in that the height of pleasure is reached with the absence of pain"--