What is Pain Good For? Understanding Pain’s Role in the Body and Mind

For anyone dealing with pain – whether personally or seeing pain or its effect on someone close – understanding pain’s purpose can be challenging. Pain has a very negative connotation in our society and particularly in the workplace. In the 2021-2022 calendar year, the Bureau of Labor and Statics recorded a median of 10 days away from work and 15 days of restricted work due to workplace injuries and illnesses. Pain is one of the leading factors as to why employees need these restrictions or recovery days, as well as what prevents them from carrying on normal activities outside of work.

At Industry Health Solutions (IHS), we believe that educating our staff and patients about pain is essential. Understanding pain is key to promoting recovery and well-being for our patients over the long term.

Understanding Pain Should Not be Painful

Pain is not our enemy; it serves as a mechanism to keep us safe.  How else would we know to set down a hot pan before it burns our skin?  We do not feel pain in our hands when touching a hot pan, but instead the brain interprets a message from the hand and determines the appropriate response.

Various external senses also assist in how the brain perceives pain:

• Sight
• Sound
• Smell
• Taste
• Touch

Knowing how easily our brain and senses can be deceived by illusions, it’s no surprise that pain can easily be influenced by external factors. When encountering a painful stimulus, the brain has two response options:

1. Perceived Threat: the brain believes there is a dangerous threat to the body’s tissue.
2. Example: you fall onto your hand and see a deformity in your wrist.
3. No Perceived Threat: the brain does not believe there is a dangerous threat to the body’s tissue.
4. Example: you find a cut or bruise on your body, but you do not remember when it happened because you were focused on something else.

Pain is not always going to make sense because it is easily manipulated and confused in the brain. The brain can mistakenly perceive a non-threat as a threat. It is like a smoke alarm that is supposed to go off when it detects smoke, but now it goes off every time the stove turns on. A person’s relationship and understanding of pain greatly influences correct and incorrect pain alarms in the brain. It is essential to understand that:

• Tissue damage is not directly correlated to pain.
• Tissue healing is not directly correlated to improved pain.

How to Improve Pain

Pain management isn’t just about providing pain relief—it’s about a thorough understanding of the patient’s experience and needs. Effective pain management factors include:

• Pain education: Understanding pain helps patients manage it better
• Restoring tissue damage: Focusing on healing injured areas
• Trusting relationships: Establishing a supportive, patient-centered relationship
• Early return to movement and activity: Gradual return to activity to accelerate recovery
• Understanding the patient’s needs: Personalized care improves outcomes.

Simply prescribing painkillers to patients without a comprehensive plan is not an effective method to improve outcomes in your medical clinics. The opioid epidemic in America is a good indicator of the failures of this poor healthcare practice. The human body produces its own natural painkillers and inhibitors through positive activities.  Exercise and movement, eating, socializing, etc., are all ways to release these natural painkillers. Unpleasant experiences can have the opposite effect on pain and healing.

A patient’s return to regular activities, including work, contributes to a sense of purpose, which can improve their pain experience and recovery.

Functional Pain Scale

Aside from the physiological understanding of pain, there is a functional understanding that must take place. IHS uses a functional pain scale to relate discomfort to objective tasks in the workplace and home to better understand a patient’s issues from the clinician’s standpoint. Objectifying the pain by relating it to functionality creates a consistent treatment model that improves overall outcomes while allowing for better understanding of the patient’s subjective view on pain. To give an example, a patient may explain that their pain level is a 7/10 on a traditional scale, but after reviewing a functional scale which relates the pain to their ability to complete their job or most of the tasks, it can be seen as a 2-3/10, which means the patient perceives the pain as high, but they are not being as impacted in the workplace.

Conclusion

At Industry Health Solutions, we understand that treating the patient is more than focusing on the damaged tissue. It requires a multifaceted approach looking at the entire individual as a whole person and not a singular body part. By integrating our healthcare professionals directly into client workplaces, we gain a deep understanding of patients’ job functions and their physical demands. Furthermore, educating patients to not only understand pain, but to objectify it by relating it to daily activities through a functional pain scale creates a more consistent/successful treatment model while minimizing the confusion created by one’s independent impression of pain. This allows IHS to support patients in returning to work safely, reducing pain, and engaging in what gives their life purpose.