Pain

Pain is an unpleasant feeling often caused by intense or damaging stimuli, such as stubbing a toe, burning a finger, putting alcohol on a cut, and bumping the "funny bone." The International Association for the Study of Pain's widely used definition states: "Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage".

Pain motivates the individual to withdraw from damaging situations, to protect a damaged body part while it heals, and to avoid similar experiences in the future. Most pain resolves promptly once the painful stimulus is removed and the body has healed, but sometimes pain persists despite removal of the stimulus and apparent healing of the body; and sometimes pain arises in the absence of any detectable stimulus, damage or disease.

Pain is the most common reason for physician consultation in the United States. It is a major symptom in many medical conditions, and can significantly interfere with a person's quality of life and general functioning. Psychological factors such as social support, hypnotic suggestion, excitement, or distraction can significantly modulate pain's intensity or unpleasantness.

Famous quotes containing the word pain:

“The time comes when each one of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow- men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

“Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)

“Each body has its art, its precious prescribed
Pose, that even in passion’s droll contortions, waltzes,
Or push of pain or when a grief has stabbed,
Or hatred hacked is its, and nothing else’s.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)