To my knowledge, most if not all the pain pathways are well mapped out and we have an array of biochemical, and other physical scientific methods which we can employee to actually quantify, measure, scale actual pain felt by the patient s? Let's take for example vision and hearing sensory input. We are able as of now to quantify and qualify our visual an auditory sensations. It is probably because the needed information for the visual and auditory are already available via other sciences e.g. physics, chemistry, mathematics, all we have to do was to apply these information to the visual and auditory sensory systems? unlike pain, where special information and data collection should be done?
It's not so easy to define "pain" (as for many other complex and multidimensional experiences). Also, the "pain matrix" is quite huge, consisting of many parts of the nervous system. In addition, there are so many variables influencing the subjective experience, that one's "objective pain" could be very similar to another's, while the subjective experiences (arguably, what really matters) are quite distinct.
Dear Taissir Nouri
Check this:
https://massivesci.com/articles/measuring-pain-animal-testing-ouch/
How do we measure pain, anyway?
You can’t exactly ask a rat to point to where it hurts
Thank you very much. There must be a scientific method to actually quantify and measure the physical pain s endured by the body?
There are advanced noninvasive Technics? which could examine possibly the posterior Insula for neural networks input weight from different anatomical structures which are the possible source of pain?
https://www.google.com/search?q=pain+center+in+the+brain&oq=pain+center+in+tge&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l2.10057j0j7&client=ms-android-mpcs-us-revc&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
In addition, a possible of how to quantify pain would be, the ratio of used possible pain receptors/ all unused the possible pain receptors in the Posterior Insula? With regard to certain type of pain?
Pain is a subjective experience, by definition. So there is no such thing as "objective pain".
Attempts to "measure" pain suffer from all the difficulties of measuring any subjective experience, e.g. measuring happiness.
So, with the current state of knowledge, it is unfortunately not correct to state that there "must be a scientific method to actually quantify and measure the physical pain as experienced by the body".
What is meant by "physical pain"? It could be possible to measure and quantify the activation of various nociceptive pathways, but how that activation relates to the experience of pain will is problematic.
Let's take for example vision and hearing sensory input. We are able as of now to quantify and qualify our visual an auditory sinsations. Is it because visual and auditory sinsations are somewhat desirable bye the public and so for this reason s we were motivated to measure quantitatively and qualitatively measure the visual and the auditory sensations but not for pain sensation s because it's not a favorite public topic?
Hi Taissir
I think that visual and auditory pathways have a more tightly organised structure with almost one-to-one correspondence between stimulus and response. Whereas nociceptive pathways are a more ancient system and more diffuse. And any sensory modality can be painful if it is experienced by the person as aversive.
With visual and auditory pathways, we can more easily measure the neural responses to the stimuli as they are transmitted to the the central nervous system and then into association cortex, but we cannot measure the subjective experience of the individual person. Hence the age-old philosophical question of whether my subjective experience of the quality of redness when I see a red object is the same as your subjective experience. Remember pain is, by definition, the subjective experience.
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