All human beings cry. From the birth to the death, from the womb to the tomb, tears have become a part of people's lives. Babies cry for a variety of reasons: hunger, ear pain, physical hurt, indigestion, burns, and wetness. Children scream when they lose a fight. Sympathetic adults shed tears when touched by a tender scene. Some suitors become teary-eyed upon hearing the sweet sound of yes from the lady they are wooing. In moments of triumph, winners burst into tears of joy. When teased or scolded, sensitive individuals sob. The risk and broken-hearted cry out of pain and anguish. Others mourn the loss of their loved ones.
Tears are an expression or result of an intense emotion. But they are also an important part of the human body's protective mechanism. Tears are small drops of fluid secreted by two lachrymal glands located behind each of a person's eyelids. These glands squeeze out their salty solution through small ducts in the underside of the eyelids. Each time the eyelids blinks, it suck a little fluid from the glands. This fluid then bathes the cornea, the transparent front part of the eyeball's outer coat. Without the moisture provided by these fluids, the eyeball would rub so painfully on the inside lining of the eyelids. Tears also wash away foreign particles in the eye such as dust, hair, and other minute particles. When the eye is irritated tears overflow.Tears also contain proteins that help make our sight organ immune to infection. It also has a mild germicide called lysozyme that kill bacteria and other potentially harmful microbes.
Tears promote the health of our eyes. But their release also helps develop our emotional and social well-being. Children normally cry when afraid or hurt. It has been a tradition among many families to make boys ashamed of showing pain or fear. Since crying is considered unmanly, boys tend to repress and deny all kind of feelings, including tenderness. This impedes their ability to establish a wholesome relationship with family members, freinds, and fellow workers. Suppressed grief could also affect one's nervous system.
When a person experiences fervid emotion such as grief or great joy, the muscles around the lachrymal glands tighten up and squeeze copious tear fluids. So when you feel like crying allow yourself to cry. These lachrymal glands and tears stored in them are natural parts of human beings placed there for a purpose. They are to protect our eye and provide us a means of expressing our most intense emotions.
Showing posts with label chronic pain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chronic pain. Show all posts
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
Unpleasant Sensation
Pain is an unpleasant sensation. People generally associate pain with physical injuries or illnesses. But feelings and emotions can also produce pain. For example, an noyance can produce painful tension in the neck muscles. Pain is highly personal sensation. An injury that causes severe pain is one person might produce only moderate pain in another. Physicians find it difficult to measure pain and must rely largely on the patient's description of the sensation. Headache pain, for instance, provides little measurable evidence, yet headache sufferers often report extremely severe pain.
Nerves carry pain signal to the brain in the form of electric impulses. The brain responds to these signals in different ways, depending on the situation. In some cases, the brain does not react immediately to the signals. For example, an athlete injured during a game may not notice any pain until the contest is over. In such cases, the brain ignores the pain signals because it is concentrating on other tasks.
Severe pain can serve as a useful warning that something is physically wrong with the body. In most such cases, the pain disappears after the fault is corrected. Physicians refer to such short-lived, severe pain as a acute pain. It differs from chronic pain, which last a longtime. Some chronic pain results from disorders that cannot be completely cured, such as certain types of cancer and arthitis. But in other cases, pain persists even though its physical cause has been corrected. This type of chronic pain resists treatment and can lead to mental breakdowns and drug abuse. Some persons undergo many unsuccessful surgical operations in effort to control such incurable pain.
People instinctively recoil from pain and often react to it with fear and tension, which in themselves may increase the discomfort. Yet the mind and body have an innate capacity for mastering the perception of pain to some degree. Soldiers at the battle front with terrible wounds have often reported far lesser degrees of pain and required fewer analgesics than civilians with comparable injuries.
It is also possible to summon up the body's pain-regulating mechanism through training and effort. Religious ascetics purposely inflict injury on themselves to pursue a spiritual goal, yet they experience no pain when they practice such extreme forms of self-mortification as walking through fire. Women trained in psychoprophylaxis, a relaxation technique for natural childbirth, can endure labor pains with little or no medication.
In such instances, the brain has probably mobilized the body's endorphins-morphine-like substances in the nervous system and gut that suppress pain. One experiment showed that when people believe pain will be lessened, it is. A group of patients who were told they had received a painkiller but were in fact given a placebo- a pill without analgesic effect- actually increased the levels of endorphins in their systems and experienced a decline in discomfort.
Nerves carry pain signal to the brain in the form of electric impulses. The brain responds to these signals in different ways, depending on the situation. In some cases, the brain does not react immediately to the signals. For example, an athlete injured during a game may not notice any pain until the contest is over. In such cases, the brain ignores the pain signals because it is concentrating on other tasks.
Severe pain can serve as a useful warning that something is physically wrong with the body. In most such cases, the pain disappears after the fault is corrected. Physicians refer to such short-lived, severe pain as a acute pain. It differs from chronic pain, which last a longtime. Some chronic pain results from disorders that cannot be completely cured, such as certain types of cancer and arthitis. But in other cases, pain persists even though its physical cause has been corrected. This type of chronic pain resists treatment and can lead to mental breakdowns and drug abuse. Some persons undergo many unsuccessful surgical operations in effort to control such incurable pain.
People instinctively recoil from pain and often react to it with fear and tension, which in themselves may increase the discomfort. Yet the mind and body have an innate capacity for mastering the perception of pain to some degree. Soldiers at the battle front with terrible wounds have often reported far lesser degrees of pain and required fewer analgesics than civilians with comparable injuries.
It is also possible to summon up the body's pain-regulating mechanism through training and effort. Religious ascetics purposely inflict injury on themselves to pursue a spiritual goal, yet they experience no pain when they practice such extreme forms of self-mortification as walking through fire. Women trained in psychoprophylaxis, a relaxation technique for natural childbirth, can endure labor pains with little or no medication.
In such instances, the brain has probably mobilized the body's endorphins-morphine-like substances in the nervous system and gut that suppress pain. One experiment showed that when people believe pain will be lessened, it is. A group of patients who were told they had received a painkiller but were in fact given a placebo- a pill without analgesic effect- actually increased the levels of endorphins in their systems and experienced a decline in discomfort.
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