Where does pain come from?
Pain can come from many sources in the body. With everyday pain — for example, if you cut yourself or have a stomachache — pain receptors in your skin, muscles and organs send a chemical signal through your nerves to the spinal cord. The signal travels through the spinal cord to your brain. When the pain signals get to the brain, you feel the pain and react accordingly. This type of pain serves the purpose of having the person protect the injured part of the body from experiencing further damage.
Pain may also come from nerves that have been damaged, such as in diabetic peripheral neuropathy. This type of pain is usually chronic. In this setting, the damaged nerves keep communicating the same warning to the body despite the fact that the damage has already taken place.
For some people experiencing chronic pain, the source of the pain isn’t related to damaged tissue at all. Instead, it the symptom comes from changes in the brain that cause for the sensation to be amplified and repeated by rerouting messages through new paths in the central nervous system. This is called neuroplasticity, and it usually helps the brain function more efficiently. But as the brain gets faster at processing sensory signals, it can become so sensitive it can no longer accurately detect danger and the messages get distorted. When the central nervous system can’t accurately detect danger, it sometimes sends frequent pain signals to the brain, leading to chronic pain. This form of pain is called neuroplastic pain and serves no helpful purpose. It is often regarded as a disease in itself.
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