TY - CHAP M1 - Book, Section TI - Pain A1 - Ropper, Allan H. A1 - Samuels, Martin A. A1 - Klein, Joshua P. A1 - Prasad, Sashank PY - 2019 T2 - Adams and Victor's Principles of Neurology, 11e AB - The ambiguity with which the term pain is used is responsible for some of our difficulty in understanding it. One aspect, the easier to comprehend, is the transmission of impulses along certain pathways in response to potentially tissue-damaging stimuli, that is, nociception. Far more abstruse is its quality as a mental state intimately linked to emotion, the quality of anguish or suffering that defies definition and quantification, or “a passion of the soul,” in the words of Aristotle. This duality (nociception and suffering) is of practical importance, for certain drugs or surgical procedures, such as cingulotomy, may reduce the patient’s reaction to painful stimuli, leaving awareness of sensation largely intact. Further complexities are that the symptom of pain may persist despite interruption of neural pathways that abolish all sensation (i.e., denervation dysesthesia or anesthesia dolorosa), or that pain may continue to be perceived from the absent part of an amputated limb (“phantom pain”). Finally, pain can be evoked by almost any sensory modality, such as touch, pressure, heat, or cold, if it is intense enough. SN - PB - McGraw-Hill Education CY - New York, NY Y2 - 2024/10/03 UR - neurology.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1162589974 ER -