Pain and the nervous system for Dummies
Hello my name is Tony, and I like to do drarwrings! Graphic designers feel free to revel in my MS paint skills. Thanks grandma for letting me play around on your windows PC in the bygone era before the internet.
What is that a perfectly rendered drawing of you might ask? It’s a copy of what my Neuromusc-2 professor, the dread Doctor Rottacker, presented to us for illustrating pain.
- End organ pain. Classic pain. Pain receptor pain. You missed the nail and hit your thumb with a hammer. Ow. Pain. Normal. This pain responds well to shaking your hand, icing, over the counter meds, and swearing.
- Spinal cord pain. The “lateral spinothalamic tract” is the name of the area in the spinal cord that carries pain nerves from the end organ to the brain. Sometimes we can get our wires crossed here and the result is pain down the line. This nefarious type of pain is tricky. It can respond well to spinal adjustments and other strange seemingly unrelated interventions like eye movements, exercises, cold laser . . . . the functional neurology field loves to treat this stuff. Almost as much as they like to treat . . .
- Brain pain:
yep. That image makes MY brain hurt. This image is technically about how pain is related to cognitive impairment, but you can see how many interrelated signals and areas there are that respond to pain.
Pain that is coming from the brain or spinal cord is often referred to as nueroplastic. That means your nervous system is misbehaving and sending faulty pain signals. This may look like pain hypersensitivity, pain with normal movements, migratory pain, stress/emotional pain, you know, the weird stuff. This pain responds well to brain retraining tricks like cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness meditation, novel exercise and movement habits, and all the fun functional neurology toys mentioned earlier. These books are a good place to start if you think you may have some “weird pain”. “The Way Out” by Alan Gordon, “Healing Back Pain” by John Sarno.