Understand Pain Science

A man was working on a building site when he stood on a nail – it went straight through his foot and he could see the sharp point of the nail sticking up out of the top of his boot.

He shouted to his colleagues who immediately drove him to the hospital, as he was screaming in agonising pain. On arrival the doctors quickly removed his boot to assess the damage.

Except, there wasn’t any. The nail had miraculously gone between his toes and missed his foot entirely. And suddenly the man felt no pain at all.

So what’s going on here? 

This story demonstrates how the brain will produce pain in response to what it perceives as a threat to the body. The man’s eyes saw what they believed to be a nail impaling his foot. This sent a message to his brain that pain needed to be produced in order to make the man seek help to repair the damage.

It works the other way too. When I broke my arm when I was nine years old, I carried on with life because it looked like there was no damage. I went to school and even played in a netball match before finally getting an x-ray which revealed a green-stick fracture. But because I was convinced that there was nothing wrong, my brain saw no reason to produce pain.

So how does pain become chronic?

Pain as a result of an injury is there for a good reason. If you break your ankle while running downhill, the pain you feel makes you stop running immediately and rest. Your body knows the danger of continuing to run and the damage it will cause. So far, so good.

But most injuries heal within three months. Yet countless people still experience pain even though the body is no longer damaged. Why is this?

When you are injured your body creates new neural pathways in your brain to send pain to the area that has been affected. Unfortunately the body doesn’t always know to turn these signals off, even when the body has healed.

And so you continue to feel pain and nearly always believe that your body is still damaged. In fact, it is your brain trying to prevent you from causing the same injury again. Clever, right?

But when you are experiencing chronic pain, which can last for decades, knowing this might be interesting, or a relief that there is no damage, but incredibly frustrating.

Science proves you can beat pain

The good news is, with a lot of hard work, patience and perseverance, science has shown that you can rewire those neural pathways. You can reassure your brain that everything is okay with your body and it doesn’t need to send pain to protect you.

It isn’t going to be a smooth or easy ride but it can work. And you’ve just taken the first step by understanding that there can be pain with no damage.

The reassurance that you have just read sends a message to your brain that you are okay and begins the process of turning down the volume on pain.