Pain Definition

Pain is experienced by everyone, but it is a complex and private experienced. Because it is such an abstract phenomenon, major difficulties aries when one attempts to describe or explain it. Many factors operate to make pain hard to understand or assess. These element include psychosocial factors, the subjectivity of the pain experience, and the lack of valid and reliable instruments to measure clinical pain. The interpretation of pain via behavioral manifestations equally cumbersome because the magnitude of response to pain is vulnerable to individual differences.

Several attempts have been made to define pain in description or measureable terms, yet no one definition is more accepted than another. Among the most popular definition of pain are those of Sternbach, McCaffery, and Internasional Association on Pain. Sternbach (1968, p.12) asserted that pain is “an abstract concept which refers to

1.    A personal, private sensation of hurt.

2.   A hurmful stimulus which signals current or impending tissue damage.

3.   A pattern of responses to protect organism from harm.

This comprehensive definition serves to explain pain through a physiologic, psychologic,and social approach.

  McCaffery (1979b, p.11) offered a more personal explanational of pain when she state the pain “is what ever the experiencing person says it is and exists when ever he says it does”. This understanding of pain requires that the client is seen as the authority on the pain and as only one who can define the experience.

Finally, the Internasional Association on Pain (1979) described it as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with accual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.