Hello and welcome to the Zero to Finals podcast.

My name is Tom and in this episode I'm going to be going through pain management.

And you can find written notes on this topic at zero tofinals.com slash pain management

or in the anesthetics and ICU section of the Zero to Finals Surgery Book.

So let's get straight into it.

The International Association for the Study of Pain, or IASP, publishes a definition of pain,

and this is from 2020.

Their definition of pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience

associated with or resembling that associated with actual or potential tissue damage.

It's important to distinguish between two categories of pain, acute pain, which is a new onset

of pain, and chronic pain, where the pain has been present for three months or more. When you're

managing pain, see the local guidelines and seek advice from seniors and pain or palliative care

specialists when in doubt.

This section aims to help students prepare for exams

and should not be used as a reference for managing pain in patients.

Let's talk about some basic pain physiology.

There are two aspects to the experience of pain,

the sensory experience and the affective experience.

The sensory experience refers to the sensory signal transmitted from the pain receptor.

An example of this is when the patient says it's a sharp sensation like a needle.

The affective experience is the unpleasant emotional reaction to the pain,

and an example of this would be when a patient says,

...