Outline Theories about the experience of ‘Pain’. Pain has been experienced by everyone regardless of age, gender or economic status. Pain is usually described as unfavorable experience that has a lasting emotional and disabling influence on the individual. Theories that explain and assist inunderstanding what pain is, how it originates and why we feel it are the Specificitytheory, Pattern Theory and Gate theory. In this paper I will attempt to demonstrate myunderstanding of the theories and also will be critically analyzing the theories aboutthe experience of pain by incorporating relevant concepts from literature and relatingit to psychology. Pain has been described with a wide range of different words. McCaffery (cited inAdams and Bromley, p192, 1998 ) simply states that the experience of pain as being “what the experiencing person says it is, existing when he says it does”. Thisdefinition by McCaffery strongly indicates that pain is conceived and experienceddifferently in an individualized manner .McCafferys’s definition of pain suggestsexperiences of pain depends only on the person experiencing the pain and that noother person is fully capable to understand how he/she may be feeling as the result ofpain. McCaffery does not actually state in his definition what pain is and what causesthe discomfort, how and why pain arises(Adams and Bromley,1998). Bond (1984) describes pain as being a personal and unique experience which arises in the braindue to injury to the body tissue, disease or due to biochemical changes in our bodies. There are two main types of pain, acute and chronic. Acute pain is experienced for ashort time and usually has a specific cause and purpose such as injury to body tissue(Adams and Bromley, 1998). Acute pain can be treated using drugs such as aspirin orother method of pain relieve. Chronic pain has no time limit therefore, can last formonths and years, and serves no obvious bi...
