How the mother reacts will set a pain pattern for the child.
If the child is told "It's nothing to worry about. We will clean off any dirt and put a band-aid or little bandage on it to keep it clean". This is done without emotion and child then told to continue playing. On the other hand the mother expresses concern and says some like "Oh Dear, how did you hurt yourself etc." This enhances the pain and establishes it as a real problem. The brain sets up a warning system that remembers the level of pain establish a base line of pain level as either nothing to worry about or serious.
How do we measure pain?
Doctors will ask “Do you have any pain”, or “How bad is it” and usually you are asked to give it a number between 1 and 10. What does this mean?
Humans are very good at most things but giving points to How much we are hurting, or in Love, or are Frightened isn’t something we are good at. However, Doctors need to get some idea of how bad the it is therefore we have a problem we don’t know how to choose something that we have no experience in doing. If we have learned as children as above or when getting a needle put in your arm you will already have experiences to set those as a base level.
When it comes to body temperature that’s precise and everyone who has a raised temperature is the same form one patient to another. Also, one person might be hurting more than another person who has the same problem because there are a lot of things involved which we will explain below
Here is a guide that breaks it into groups allowing you give a response that your doctors will understand about how you feel.
1 to 4 is manageable; 5 to 7 moderate and 8 to 10 severe. All replies should be given extra meaning like. “It was about a level 4 when it started to hurt but since taking a painkiller its manageable but I can still feel some discomfort” Five seems to be the beginning of when painkillers are not helping much but when you get to eight it is seriously a problem for you and from 5 onward it will be something you have never experienced before. We could say a 10 was like putting your arm in boiling oil but we wouldn’t know how much it would hurt until we feel it. This means we don't really know how much we can handle until it happens to us.
The above should demonstrate that our brain sets the level for each of us and everyone will be different
Can we control how much anything will hurt?
Yes we can:
These days there are lots of medicines and treatment Morphine and other heavy-duty painkillers, and all the known treatments – physical therapy, traction (stretching the neck), massage, self-hypnosis, heat, ice, rest, anti-inflammatory drugs therefore doctors have something that helps
Also, there is neuroplasticity – using the brain’s own structure and functioning in response to activity and mental experience – for treating how we feel. The idea that chronic hurt was caused by a neoplastic event of the brain had been proposed by the German physiologist Manfred Zimmermann in 1978, but neuroplasticity remained generally unaccepted for another 25 years
Neuropathic pain occurs because of the behavior of neurons that send signal to specific processing areas in our brain. Touch a part of the body’s surface and a specific part of the brain, devoted to that spot, will start to react. When the neurons in this area get damaged, they keep sending signals that are wrong, making us feel hurt in our body when actually it is mostly in our brain. Even after the body has healed, the system is still sending false signals and in such cases our feeling moves into being chronic situation indicating the problem is still there but really the brain is itself imagining the illness., therefore the brain itself is in trouble. The body’s alarm system is stuck in the “on” position because the brain has been unable to remedy the cause of an acute pain and the central nervous system has become damaged and very difficult to treat.”
However, much work has been done and it is recommended that people with long term problems talk to their doctor about how to manage pain.
