Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience. Pain is a subjective experience and your dog will have very different experiences of the same pain and cope in alternative ways to other dogs.
REMEMBER PAIN DOES NOT COME JUST FROM INJURY – it can be: Digestive Pain, Joint Pain, Back Pain, Headache or From a Lack of Sleep.
Pain can be broken down to into several elements:
Physical Pain
Somatic (Limbs, Muscles, Skin), Visceral (Internal Organs, Stomach) , Neuropathic (Nerves and Spinal Cord)
With Physical Pain it can be Acute Pain (the one we all know sudden Physical Trauma – Broken Bone or Cut) OR Chronic Pain.
Acute Pain is more easily described and observed and is short lived – a survival mechanism.
Chronic Pain is not so easily described and very subjective depending on the individual – which is why you need to know your dog behaviour and movement.
Emotional Pain
The experience of unpleasant emotions is often referred to as “Emotional Pain”, such as when someone loses a loved one.
The emotions that arise when one’s social bonds with another are impaired or lost – such as feelings of isolation, loneliness, and rejection – comprise one type of emotional pain, called “social pain”.
Recent research has found that the term “pain” is not just a metaphor, but is based on the finding that social pain is processed in the same brain regions where physical pain is processed.
When something changes – NEVER RULE PAIN OUT