Small Nerve Pain Fibers in Pain Assessment

¶ … feasible to measure pain because it is located in the thalamus. Is pain able to be measured objectively? Just as a blood pressure of 220/110 will give us some information about the cardiovascular system, assessing the peripheral pain pathway can help in the diagnosis and treatment of a patient's pain. Part of this paper will discuss the pain problem. People tend to view reports of pain with suspicion and disbelief. How is pain assessed at this time? Are there any objective markers of pain? How efficient are the current measurements of pain? Is the electromyography (EMG) test a good measurement of the nerve pain pathway? The pain pathway from the free nerve ending in the amydala hypothalamus will also be reviewed. The following section will discuss various instrumentations that currently exist, and how the pain sensory of the a-delta fibers can be measured. Another section will discuss the pathophysiology and its relevance to pain fibers including the most common types of pain disorders from the neck and low back. Pains costs, both medical and to the economy, are reviewed. The latest physiology of pain is also reviewed, along with the effectiveness of conventional compared to unconventional diagnostic technologies.

Summary

The cost of neck and back pain is found to be one of the highest, if not the highest in the U.S. This is mainly due to the staggering percentage of cases where conventional diagnostic methods cannot effectively direct treatment. This misdirection results in incorrect interventions and surgeries. Early studies using newly developed technology support that early, accurate localization of the sensory pathology is now possible. They also show that this new technology deserves further study to prefect and spread its use to realize its full potential in the diagnosis of sensory disorders.

Introduction

National Institute of Health data supports that 40% of patients seeking medical consultation do so because they are experiencing pain. Most of these cases are neck and low back ones. The problem faced by physicians is determining whether the pain is real, imagined or is being magnified to procure a prescription for medication. Since pain is considered subjective, without any objective method to quantify it, the physician is in a position where he must rely on his/her evaluation of indirect findings and belief in the patient's veracity to determine if the problem is real, imagined or if the patient is magnifying the symptoms in order to obtain pain medication. Since there are usually little objective concomitant findings, the physician is left in a position where he either does or does not believes the patient. What is a physician to do?