NURS 83PL Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Central Nervous System, Spinal Cord
Document Summary
Pain is a complex, multi-dimensional personal experience that can cause suffering and decreased quality of life. 25 million people in the us experience acute pain each year as a result of injury or surgery. Examples of chronic pain: arthritis, migraines, back pain. Unrelieved pain and inadequate management costs an estimated -635 billion each year in direct medical costs and lost work productivity. Definition of pain: whatever the person experiencing the pain says it is, existing whenever the person says it does margo mccaffery, rn and pioneer in pain management. An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage international association for the study of pain. There are four processes that describe how information about tissue damage is communicated to the central nervous system (cns). Nociception is how pain becomes a conscious experience. Transduction: noxious (tissue damaging) stimuli (mechanical, thermal, chemical) cause cell damage and release sensitizing chemicals.
