Just as northerners have a whole language to describe the different kinds of snow that make up winter's landscape, so is there a language of pain . At a recent forum on women and pain at Toronto General Hospital, participants were given a sheet with 60 painful words as different as pinching and drilling, punishing and penetrating. Not someone who experiences chronic pain, I scanned the words for one to describe the occasional migraine headache I get, and found the word sickening was the perfect fit. And in interviewing heart attack survivors, I recall their descriptions of crushing, radiating chest pain. A rose is a rose is a rose, but the landscape of pain can be a pain to describe.
Scientists call it the pain paradox.
But because it's so subjective, we can never really know what someone else's pain is like. The newest pain theory to emerge has not only revolutionized pain research, but also the treatment of pain. Though pain is defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage, you don't need to have an injury to experience pain, Katz explains, because the experience of it is a psychological event. Nonetheless, acute pain needs to be measured in order to treat it well. And the newest measurement tool that's exciting scientists is called the McGill Pain Questionnaire, important because it combines all aspects of the pain experience.