Many people who have chronic pain wonder why we just do not have a test to prove they have pain. To every person who has pain, it is obvious that something is wrong. With so many people having pain, most people wonder why there is no test for it. It is considered so important that it has been termed the fifth vital sign. The other vitals like pulse or blood pressure can all be measured, so when are we going to be able to measure pain?
Recently there have been several articles in the press about techniques to measure pain. One of these is to measure pupil reactions to light and other reactions to stimuli to determine whether something is painful or not. So far, information obtained is just correlated on an individual basis and is not helpful to determine if a particular person has pain.
Quantifying Pain
Scientists have been looking for a definitive measure of pain for years. The NIH (National Institutes of Health) has looked at everything from brain scans to blood tests and measuring various body signals from pupils to pulses for a quantifiable way to determine pain. The overall problem is pain is subjective and based on the emotional interpretation of sensory signals. Simply put, everyone feels sensory signals differently and they can vary even with the same person depending on the circumstances at the time. The same pain sensations can be horrible one day and mildly annoying at a different time. It is totally dependent on all the other signals that the brain has to concentrate and interpret. If I am distracted by pleasurable visual sensations, I may not realize pain. If I am emotionally distraught, a painful stimulus may be excruciating.
To measure pain, one needs to measure the brain’s level of perception and interpretation of a variety of sensory signals. We also need to know what are the significant areas in the brain that are interconnected and how they determine our perceptions of pain. At this time we know there are sensory signals triggered in the body and we know the brain receives these signals. We do not know why one input may be horrible pain and another similar signal is mild pain. We do know pain is what each person perceives it to be in his or her own individual interpretation. Your pain is not the same as mine, even if the physical problem is the same.
Pain is a problem because it is difficult to measure and it is a different experience for every person. The impact of pain on the quality of life is tremendous since 30 percent of the world population suffers chronically from pain. Better understanding of pain is necessary to develop strategies to manage the problems associated with it.