What is pain?
The most internationally recognized definition of pain is:
"Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or similar to that associated with actual or potential tissue damage."
IASP, 2020
The definition was developed and last updated in 2020 by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP).
The definition of pain should be seen in the context of some further descriptions, including that:
- Pain is always a personal experience, influenced to varying degrees by biological, psychological, and social factors.
- We learn about pain through our personal and individual life experiences.
- A person's account of pain must be respected.
- Although pain usually has an adaptive function, meaning that it helps the person to adapt, it can have undesirable effects on physical function and social and emotional well-being.
These additions are meant to help us better understand how nuanced and complex pain really is. The wording states, among other things, that a pain experience does not only consist of an unpleasant physical aspect but also an unpleasant emotional aspect. Therefore, it is not only the physical sensation itself that constitutes the pain experience, it is also the emotional discomfort that follows the physical sensation. In other words, pain begins as a physical signal from the body, but it is only when the signal registers as a discomfort in our consciousness that it becomes a pain.
