Pain is a complicated, often debilitating medical problem that can have a major impact on your physical and mental well-being. It is an unpleasant sensation and emotional experience usually caused by tissue damage. It allows the body to react to and prevent further tissue damage. People feel pain when a signal travels through nerve fibers to the brain for interpretation.
This type of pain is generally intense and short-lived. It is how the body alerts a person to an injury or localized tissue damage. Treating the underlying injury usually resolves acute pain.
This type of pain lasts far longer than acute pain, and there is often no cure. Chronic pain can be mild or severe. It can also be continuous, such as in arthritis, or intermittent, as with a migraine episode. Intermittent pain occurs on repeated occasions but stops between flares.
This pain occurs following injury to the peripheral nerves that connect the brain and spinal cord to the rest of the body. It can feel like electric shocks or cause tenderness, numbness, tingling, or discomfort.
Phantom pain occurs after the amputation of a limb. It refers to painful sensations that feel as though they are coming from the missing limb.
This type of pain often occurs due to infarction, abscesses, tumors, degeneration, or bleeding in the brain and spinal cord. Central pain is ongoing, ranging from mild to extremely severe. People with central pain report burning, aching, and pressing sensations.
A muscle cramp is a sudden and involuntary contraction of one or more of your muscles. Though generally harmless, muscle cramps can make it temporarily impossible to use the affected muscle. Besides the sudden, sharp pain, you might also feel or see a hard lump of muscle tissue beneath your skin.
