Pain is a percept: it is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience, a
product of the brain’s abstraction that might be considered an activity mediated event:
the activity being the message and pain the messenger warning of imminent or actual
injury or imbalance yet to be avoided or resolved. There are no ‘painful stimuli’ that is
stimuli that invariably elicit the perception of pain in all individuals and it is this highly
individual and subjective nature of pain that makes it difficult to define and to treat
clinically. The key to understanding and therefore appropriate treatment is in
deciphering the message. Recognising and respecting the interdependence of both the
clinician and researcher in the search for deeper discernment proffers the potential for
synergistic evolution in understanding and treatment with the promise of bringing relief
to many sufferers of both explained and unexplained pain.
Keywords: Allodynia, Central sensitisation, Chronic pain, Clinical application,
Clinical experience, Global syndrome, Idiopathic pain, Neural activity,
Neuroplasticity, Occlusion, Orofacial pain, Pain, Patient centred, Persistent pain,
Precision medicine, Psychoneuroimmunology, Psychosocial, TMD.
