Pain: Case Study: Specificity Theory Of Pain

Topic Name: Pain

Student Name and ID numbers: Mariam Haitham Alnweran

U15106145

Section No.: 71

Instructor: Veena Raigangar Laxman

What is Pain? Pain is a subjective symptom that can’t be measured but described verbally, its stimulus caused usually be injuries, diseases or illnesses, but since the pain is a psychological awareness, in some cases it may happen without actual damage and described as if the damage happened.

Pain can be affected by many factors like age, gender and social norms about acceptable pain behavior. It has many benefits since it works like a warning signal if something is going wrong, and that make the individual protect the damaged site during healing and avoid similar damage in the future,

The determination of the type of sensation that each nerve fiber will produce depends on specific energy, so the specific energy will determine for each stimulus if its signal will be detected or not. The threshold is higher in pain nerve fibers than normal sensation nerve fiber, thus a higher pain stimulation energy required.

Based on this theory we can say that the intensity of the pain depends on the amount or severity of the injury, and this work only on the acute pain condition when elimination of the pain cause will be enough to make the pain disappear whereas in chronic conditions the role is different and this theory isn’t applicable to

Non-Pharmacological pain management: It’s managing pain by different modalities that reduce the pain in addition to medications at the same time, and that’s done by stimulating specific sensory receptors in different methods like heat and cold agents, physical therapy, TENS and massage therapy. For example, if we had a patient with low back pain and based on the gate theory we would use deep heating agents to heat both the superficial soft tissue and deep muscles and this will help in inhibiting the pain signals, thus stop or reduce the pain.

The traditional methods of pain controlling are not the non-pharmacological pain management, the distraction of the patient from thinking about the pain and provide a peaceful environment for the patient for relaxation can also be effective techniques.

Pharmacological pain