Pain education - educating patients or making sense of pain together?
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In my last post I shared some thoughts on pain education and the phrase 'pain is an output of the brain'. I compared pain as output to pain as a lived, conscious, complex experience that people feel. From my perspective, describing pain as an output robs the experience of pain's harsh, all-encompassing, life-changing reality. We are not machines producing outputs. We are people, biological organisms who are magnificently complex. (However, I do think "pain as an output" is useful within a limited context of clarifying that it is not an input. That is still highly misunderstood and needs clarifying. But the phrase doesn't explain the entirety of pain, nor was it ever meant to.) This is why I think it an important distinction to differentiate between explaining our current understanding of pain science, which is still limited (as is our understanding of consciousness, until that problem is solved how we experience being human, let alone being a human in pain, is still a big unknown), and explaining what pain
Pain education - educating patients or making sense of pain together?
Pain education - educating patients or making…
Pain education - educating patients or making sense of pain together?
In my last post I shared some thoughts on pain education and the phrase 'pain is an output of the brain'. I compared pain as output to pain as a lived, conscious, complex experience that people feel. From my perspective, describing pain as an output robs the experience of pain's harsh, all-encompassing, life-changing reality. We are not machines producing outputs. We are people, biological organisms who are magnificently complex. (However, I do think "pain as an output" is useful within a limited context of clarifying that it is not an input. That is still highly misunderstood and needs clarifying. But the phrase doesn't explain the entirety of pain, nor was it ever meant to.) This is why I think it an important distinction to differentiate between explaining our current understanding of pain science, which is still limited (as is our understanding of consciousness, until that problem is solved how we experience being human, let alone being a human in pain, is still a big unknown), and explaining what pain