TYPES OF PAIN: ORGANIC AND FUNCTIONAL PAIN
Pain may arise from injury to our body cells. This is known as organic pain. More accurately it arises from the stimulation of nerve fibres as a result of injury to the body tissues. However, some organs of the body, such as the brain itself, are not supplied with pain nerves, and these organs can be cut or otherwise injured without causing any pain at all. In other instances. due to the complicated anatomical arrangement of the nervous system, the pain is not felt in the diseased part but is felt is some other area.
It is important that we do not consider a person suffering from functional pain as imagining that he suffers pain. This is not so. He does suffer pain. Furthermore, functional pain may be very severe, and there is nothing in the quality of functional pain which automatically distinguishes it from organically determined pain. Although we can often tell one kind of pain from the other by the way in which it comes about or by the patient’s reaction to it, we cannot always distinguish the two by the actual nature or severity of the pain.
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