Published on 13 Feb 2017
Wisdom comes alone through suffering. Still there drips in sleep against the heart, grief of memory.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon
What is it to feel pain? We sense it in the body, as a non-trivial, unmediated and imperative perceptual event associated with tissue damage, possessing particular spatiotemporal characteristics of a physical object (e.g., location, quantity, intensity, duration). Pain, nevertheless, is also a subjective event—i.e., is an experience itself, not merely the representation of an object of a perceptual experience—residing on an affective-emotional axis. It seems self-evident that pain is a biologically functional “good” in promoting a hierarchy of behaviors to restore a homeostatic organismic state. What is the latest scientific understanding of pain and its management, the role of analgesics, particularly opioids, their use and abuse? How do we advance the science of pain ethically with respect to humans and other species?
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