Question

all 1a-f please

1a. Why is some pain necessary and sometimes beneficial?

b. How can the emotional response to pain impact someone's experience of pain?

c. How does stress-induced analgesia work?

d. What explanation does Sapolsky give for how acupuncture works? What explanation does he give for how placebos work?

e. Why can stress cause people to sometimes experience more pain? What is this phenomenon called?

f. What happens to stress induced analgesia and stress induced hyperalgesia, with regard to chronic stress? Does stress induced analgesia last forever?

Answer 1

1. a Pain plays an important role in the lives of humans. It presumably serves to protect us from harm by making us associate certain harmful actions with a sensation of pain. And to alert us to diseases or conditions which we may have.

Pain is a valid and necessary feeling. Physical pain stops us harming ourselves – for example, we would not touch a very hot object because burning ourselves is painful. Emotional pain helps us to grow and learn. If we did not ever feel it, we would not have felt our lives were unmanageable and got into recovery. If we do not feel emotional pain, we will not stop doing what we need to stop doing. Or start doing what we need to do. We would not appreciate when we are happy and joyful if we never had any more negative feelings.

Pain also produces an emotional reaction, not just a physical one. Some pain can be caused by grief or depression, but are not easy to measure or to classify.

Potential benefits of pain derive from its ability to inhibit other unpleasant experiences and to elicit empathy and social support. The experience of pain can benefit our defence systems, since pain can enhance motivation to accumulate resources such as social support and calorie-rich foods.

1. b there are a number of factors that impact pain, they are:-

• Age
• Gender
• Culture
• Ethnicity
• Spiritual beliefs
• Socio-economic status
• Emotional response
• Support systems
• Life before pain onset

Changes in functioning, role (societal, social, or family), daily routines, job status, and sleep disturbance may contribute to chronic pain. These factors can cause distress which may also increase pain.

Some common emotional responses to pain can include anxiety, depression, anger, feeling misunderstood, and demoralization.

1. c) Stress-induced analgesia (SIA) is an in-built mammalian pain suppression response that occurs during or following exposure to a stressful or fearful stimulus.

stress-induced analgesia is influenced by age, gender, and prior experience to stressful, painful, or other environmental stimuli. Stress-induced analgesia is mediated by activation of the descending inhibitory pain pathway

d. Acupuncture stimulates the release of large quantities of endogenous opioids, for reasons no one really understands.
The best demonstration of this is what is called a subtraction experiment: block the activity of endogenous opioids by using a drug that blocks the opiate receptor (most commonly a drug called naloxone). When such a receptor is blocked, acupuncture no longer effectively dulls the perception of pain.

Endogenous opioids turn out to be relevant to explaining placebos as well. A placebo effect occurs when a person's health improves, or the person's assessment of their health improves, merely because they believe that a medical procedure has been carried out on them, regardless of whether it actually has. This is where patients in a study either get the new medicine being tested or, without knowing it, merely a sugar pill, and sugar pill folks get somewhat better.

e) Aches and pains are a common complaint that can result from increased levels of stress. Other studies have shown that increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol may be associated with chronic pain. For example, one study compared 16 people with chronic back pain to a control group.

Excessive or prolonged activation of the stress response can result in muscle tension, aches and pains, headaches and high blood pressure. Ongoing stress can also cause people to become physically inactive and loose motivation to perform everyday tasks. This can lead to additional problems such as depression.

f) Stress hyperglycemia (also called stress diabetes or diabetes of injury) is a medical term referring to transient elevation of the blood glucose due to the stress of illness. The blood glucose usually returns to normal within hours unless predisposing drugs and intravenous glucose are continued.