Pijneducatie : Een praktische handleiding voor (para)medici

G. Lorimer Moseley Dr Lorimer Moseley is NHMR C Senior Research Fellow at the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute & The Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

In 2007 he was awarded the International Association for the Study of Pain Ulf Lindblom Award for outstanding contribution to clinical pain science. Pain is a ubiquitous, by de? nition unpleasant, and intimately personal experience, which emerges from the human brain when a network of neurons, situated in multiple brain areas, is activated.

The particular network of neurons depends on the individual - yours is unique, like a signature or ? ngerprint. Pain, as this book will tell you, is all about meaning.

Things hurt according to what they are interpreted to mean - pain is not determined by how much danger the tissues of the body are truly in, but by how much danger the brain perceives the tissues to be in.

There are two key facts to remember here though: 1 This perception, this allocation of meaning, occurs outside of c- sciousness - all we know is that it hurts - except for a very small number of people with an exceptional capacity to modify attention, we have no conscious control over whether we will experience pain and what it will be like; 2 Anything, literally anything, that might be relevant to the brain's evaluation of danger to body tissue, can affect pain.