The Anatomy of pain!

The Anatomy of pain!

                When I went to massage school I was nick named “the King of Pain” and when I was in University my interest in Neurology and Pathology as well as Biology and physiology really were centered on stimuli and the causes and sensation of pain and not just how to cause it, but how to use it and finally how to cure it.

                I noted that it has a very important roll in our evolution and can be used to really learn how to protect yourself.  My thought was that if I learned how to create pain in others greater than they could create it in me…I win!

Introduction

                In Karate we often avoid specific “non-PC” terms and subjects in the Dojo. The reason is that its not considered “Mainstream” to talk about Karate in terms of protecting yourself. Oh, we say stuff like “Karate can be used to protect yourself” For sure, but we often omit things like teaching the damage that a thumb in the eye socket can do to an aggressor or how a strike to the larynx can kill a rapist.  Why, well its because we want to be the kinder more gentle….Zen like group of people that everyone seems to want to be.  Not me….I want to know how to kill someone that wants to kill me or how to stop someone from hurting my family or even myself!

                Now, like anyone else the thought of taking someone’s life troubles me….granted I have to say probably less than it does someone else as I would without question take the life of anyone that hurt my daughter with intent to cause her any form of damage from a physical assault and I even yell at old ladies that accidentally bump her with a shopping cart…but I think that is “Daddy bear” mentality in my already “violent experienced” mind.

                I would much rather apply a hold or joint lock as it were or grab a nerve bundle and squeeze to inflict the kind of pain that will cause someone to pass out or wince and think about the pain more than me…than take their life.  Actually, I really don’t want to have to deal with the paper work and court issues if I had a choice….so I would probably defer to really hurting someone than “Taking them out” as it were.  So, I started thinking about advanced Karate and how it works, and how even basic self-protection is based on impact training, joint locks and most importantly….Pain creation in your attacker.  

                What is pain?  I mean we all know what pain is, its that very Unpleasant and very attention getting feeling we have when we hurt ourselves or when something is wrong with us physically.  I am not talking about the pain you get when someone close to you dies or when you see your girlfriend/ boyfriend/ spouse kissing someone else…no that is mental pain lasts a lot longer and is not easily healed. 

Physical pain is actually a stimuli that is created when C nerve fibers are unpleasantly stimulated.  Strangely Pain is one of the most studied subjects in medicine and we know its ins and outs and how to cause it and create it very well….thank the American military for that one boys and girls! Studies in Pain and Pain creation stretch back to before the ground breaking French researcher Dr. Albert Schwietzer wrote “pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself” which he penned in 1931.  Ancient civilizations drew pictures and associated pain with witchcraft, sorcery and the devil…..yah, they did not know much about C nerve bundles back then.

When I went to university over 15 years ago I was acutely interested in biology and physiology and especially in things that could help me explain Karate. At one point I got very interested in Massage therapy as a modality for crating improvements in performance with Karate Athletes, which is a whole other blog entry.  But I also found information and answers to my personal interest in Pain and use of Pain to control subjects, why some people fold like a card table when you do a wrist control and others, like my friend Rob, can resist and make it look like you are doing something wrong…and you know its partially ego…but is their a physiological reason for Pain not to affect some more than others?

I started researching what is pain and how it is caused, classified and can be used in a self-protection kind of way and delved deep into many a Cadaver and experimented on different people to see if it was true that ladies have a higher pain threshold than men…Nope by the way….and I also wanted to know how to be more effective and efficient at using pain to save myself in a dangerous situation and more importantly to research it and make it more acceptable to talk about Pain and inflicting pain in the Dojo without looking like some kind of mean and abusive guy…or less like one!

What is pain

                So, what is pain then, Well pain defined as a unpleasant feeling often caused by intense or damaging stimuli, such as a forced hyperextension of a joint (wrist grab or falling on your arm and forcing it to over straighten), Impact (getting punched in a “soft spot”, or stubbing a toe), a burn, laceration of the skin, or hitting a nerve on a solid object (Striking a nerve with your fist, or hitting your funny bone).  There are other types of pain stimuli but I am going to specifically try and focus on things you can affect with Karate.

                Pain can be as brief as an acute injury (think stubbing your toe or getting a needle) and can spike quickly or it can be a dull, long lasting pain such as a torn ligament or deep bruise/broken bone. But the acute pain that you can create in an opponent is the useful kind of pain.  The kind of pain that will stop someone from focusing on taking your money, your life or raping you and putting them in a situation were they are ONLY thinking of the pain and how to get away from that pain. 

                Pain causes a set of unique physical and psychological reactions that are uncontrollable by your on a conscious level, it causes the fight or flight reaction that fear causes and it also causes your body to recoil from the stimuli without your control. This stimuli and reaction can be controlled if you are ready for it but if you are not then you have no cognitive choice in the matter, you jerk away from pain and move physically further away.

Classifying pain

                Pain is classified into different categories based on the duration and source of the pain. In 1994 the International Association for the Study of Pain or IASP (no I am not a member or the founder) classified pain after finding a need for a more useful system of describing chronic pain.  They came up with Pain based categorization such as Duration pain (Chronic pain caused by long lasting stimuli like Cancers or arthritic pain), Nociceptive ( Acute and instant pain like a burn or cut), Neuropathic pain ( Caused by damage or disease affecting part of the nervous system involved in feeling and sensation), Psychogenic pain (that which the mind has created and is very real to the person experiencing it), Incident pain (Cause by specific activities…think arthritic joint issues or stretching out wounded tissue) and a few others. 

                The classification helped the specialists dealing with the specific injuries and or illnesses to work on standard practices when dealing with these different kinds of pain. For instance Cancer patients on pain medication often experience break through pain, a type of pain that is caused when the body becomes accustomed to the pain medication and will “ignore” the drug and feel the pain regardless of the dosage of pain medication that is given.  This is often treated by changing the type of drug given to cover the pain so the body cannot adjust to the medication.

                For Karate and self-protection however the classification of pain simply gave us a better way to focus on several forms of Pain and how to use it to our advantage when dealing with the attackers and how we are generating pain. It gave us a better understanding of the one tool that most clubs do not provide, how to deal with pain from both a stand point of the defender being attacked…and the defender using pain to defend themselves.

Effect on function

                Why is pain important for our survival?  Will it gets us to stop doing what is hurting us! Most pain is caused when you are doing something that will damage your structure, such as holding your hand over a stove element or fire.  This will damage the skin and can cause permanent damage and or even be life threatening.  So, when we were designed, or evolved special mechanisms for self-protection from these things (Depending on your theoretical back ground) we developed pain to help save us from doing silly things like burning ourselves to death!

                It is also a tool to stop us from re-damaging ourselves while we heal!  How often have you hurt an ankle and not been able to walk on it after….that is your body using pain to let the structure heal!

                But from a self-protection point of view, it is important to note that pain impairs attention control, working memory and mental flexibility, problem solving and information processing speed.  When we are attacked the aggressor is focused on one thing, his goal…be it rape, robbery or murder the attacker is focused, thinking only of the single goal and this is the most dangerous kind of aggressor.  But Pain will cause him to lose that single focus and purpose and bring all of his once focused attention to the source of the pain and away from his single goal. You can use pain to redirect his thinking for a time to the source of the pain. 

                Now that you have impaired his attention and are using pain his ability to process anything other than the pain is gone. His short term memory of why he was attacking you is gone!  He has no flexibility in his thought process to change thinking, problem solve and redirect his resources to finding solutions for tasks…like taking your wallet or choking you. His world and his focus is now on that point of pain…not even on what is causing it! This is as primal and basic a form of thinking mental process and coping as we have as animals/human and it will stop an aggressor for a brief second and redirect his thinking, giving you a moment or two to react and protect yourself.

Pain Thresholds

                In Pain studies a threshold is measured by gradually increasing intensity of a stimulus applied to the body.  The pain perception threshold is the point in which the stimulus begins to “hurt” and pain tolerance threshold is reached when the subject acts on the pain and cannot sustain “taking the pain” as it were.

                So how is this important to your preservation of being?  Well, different people have different gaps in the difference between perception of pain and tolerance of pain and its important to know that! We are all governed by our basic instincts and no one has ever proven, in the hundreds of years of pain study, to ignore pain and allow for permanent damage, not truly!  Some people will force themselves to undergo known pain causing activities for the sake of ego or science…or both. But they can not ignore or stop the other reactions (focus on the pain, short term memory issues ext and so on).

                Different pain perceptions and tolerance thresholds are associated with, among other factors, sex, race, ethnicity, genetics and history of pain.  For instance Italian women tolerate less intense electric “shock” pain than Jewish or Native American women….No idea how they cleared that study past the ethics board but it is what it is! Contrary to popular belief all studies ever done show that women have a lower pain perception and tolerance than men….and age does not matter.  New born boys have a higher pain threshold than new born girls.

                So, what can we take from this….if you are attacked by a man…Hit harder, do a deeper joint lock and do it suddenly so as to not alert the attacker to it and give him time to mentally guard against it!

Anticipation of pain

                Have you ever seen something coming that you just knew was going to hurt, and you started feeling the effects of it before it even happened. Or you watched a movie and saw a actor about to get hurt in a really gruesome way, and you felt that Focus on the pain, the short term complete and queasy focus on the pain that SOMEONE else is about to feel? That’s pain anticipation and you need to know two things about it to use it for yourself and counter it if it’s going to happen to you.

                First thing you need to know is it has the same first affect as the actual pain! You forget what you are doing if you truly believe that the pain is about to happen to you, you focus completely on that pain and in this case potential pain! Your mind is not free or elastic to think about grocery shopping, or taking your dog for a walk….mugging someone, taking their money or worse!

                As an experiment I have done this in a class, I brought a bag full of hammers…yes hammers!....and paired up students.  One student squatting with the hammer in hand and the target…the top of the partner’s foot! I tell the whole class to listen carefully and ONLY react when I tell them clearly what to do. I tell the standing partner that they are to count to 100 by twos…so 2,4,6,8… and not stop. They cannot look at the hammer, and have to continue to count by two’s till they reach 100. In fact they have to have their eyes closed!

  I then instruct the partners to pick up the hammer and get “ready to hit the person in the top of the foot” when I say “GO”. I signal for all of them to put the hammer away and not use it at all, but none of the “counters” Can see this. The “hammer holders” need to slap the top of the other person’s foot with their hand or hit the floor next to the “counter”.

                I then take a second and use a bit of psychology to back up my rouse by saying no matter how much it hurts, even if a bone is broken accidentally to keep counting. Some lose it right there and back out…the others will count and when I finally say “GO” 100% of people will react…differently mind you, some pull their foot away instinctively and others will react as if a hammer just dropped on their foot! They wince and pull away from pain…even when the floor next to the foot is slapped and not the foot at all…and in one case I had someone actually pass out!

                Anticipation of pain is often as useful as actual pain!

The second thing you need to know about this is that it does not work on psychotic people.  Not one bit! Its not that they have more control of themselves, actually they kind of have less, its that they are wired differently and some will even embrace the thrill of he anticipation and wont move. Not that all people that are brave enough to do the experiment are psychotic….but it makes you wonder right!

Causes: Neurology of pain

                To know what the actual mechanism of pain in our body is I am going to get a bit wordy here for a minute…don’t worry I will go back to how to cause pain in a second. First off not all nerves are created equal or have the same duties in our body. We have different kinds of nerves that run around our body like wires, and often run right beside other nerve that do different jobs.

                You have essentially three kinds of nerves; A, B and C neves.  And yes, I am going really basic here!  The C nerves are the ones we are looking at..and no I don’t know who named them or why!  The C fibers however are very unique. They lack the same kind of “Insulation” or Myelination as the other nerves have and this causes a slower conduction velocity…or to put it simpler, the message they send goes slower and it kind of bleeds off its message along the way, which is why acute pain often feels like its coming from a bigger area till you “feel around” for it a bit. Think of it as a situation like a needle being given to you. At first you feel the sharp prick of the needle, then the pain seems to be coming from your whole arm (or butt if that’s where you prefer to get them).

                Anyways, C neves are not as efficient at sending messages to and from the brain, but because of the higher conductive velocity (they feel things quicker) they are responsible for sensations of quick and shallow pain and respond to a different stimuli than A and B fibers, making them perfect for pain sensation. They are also unique in that they can react to multiple stimuli and again makes them perfect as a source for basic information and reactive stimuli. They are also responsible for reactions to things like Hypoxia, hypoglacemia, Hypo-osmolarity and light or touch sensation.  

                Because they are the “bottom feeder” nerve cells in our body and will pick up just about any stimuli and use it they are easy to distract from, so for instance if you stimulate your Delta or A nerve fibers (which are sensory fibers) you can cause your brain to ignore the C nerve fiber message and react instead to the A nerve message.  You can do this with Ice, pressure or even heat, which is why some people react to a pulled muscle with heat and not the proper way with ice!

                To round out the “Nerve fiber” education, the third Kind of Nerve fiber is B nerve fiber or Somatic nerves. They are in charge of things like blood pressure, heart rate and rhythm and other automatic things that you don’t want to have to concentrate on to have happen naturally.

How to truly cause pain and use body mechanics against an attacker

                Pain can be a very useful took in defending yourself and it can be as intricate and artistic as a wrist and elbow control or as basic as striking the face in a specific way as to not just cause damage, but cause pain in a very basic way.  The level of damage will vary depending on your ability when it comes to just a basic strike, depending on skill level, power, ability to set up a punch and a multitude of other factors. This is why its important to understand pain and how to use it, when to use it and the effects and follow up you must have to take the most advantage of the pain.

                First off catastrophic pan has a unique effect on your nervous system. It goes from trying to protect you by causing you to move away to a more focused reaction on catastrophic pain of trying to mentally protect you from the pain.  Your mind shuts out the excessive information and cuts off the pain response knowing that it is now psychologically more important to protect you from the pain than it is getting you away from it…basically your body shuts down and says that it’s a complete wash and you cannot do anything about it…so why bother feeling the pain!  This defeats the purpose of using pain, the effects we are looking for are totally a wash and you have now just basically damaged and attacker and have to hope that your attack has incapacitated them and not just infuriated them.

                So, as a tool for self-preservation, Pain must be administered at the right level and used properly for the situation at hand. In martial arts we often call the use of pain a “Pain Compliance hold” or a “Joint compliance technique” or my favorite “Pain control”.  The use of a “Pain control” is used by applying pressure or torsion to a nerve sensitive area of the body to cause the pain response you want without causing an excessive amount of damage. If the hold is not working as effectively as you want, adjust your grip, pressure or location of the pressure and you should be able to find a “good” spot for the affect to be what you want.

                Police often use pain compliance techniques when they are trying to affect the motion of a suspect or arrest someone to ensure that they are complying with the officers orders. The use of these techniques are on the low end of violence reactions from a peace officer and will escalate to a more aggravated reaction and possibly use of a fire arm to force a aggressor to comply, we however are starting in the middle with less attention to just getting someone to comply, we want them to stop doing what they are doing and force them to rethink the attack completely.

                Pain compliance techniques and body mechanics techniques are similar. Both involved either manipulating a person’s joints or activating the C nerve fibers with a strike or pressure on them, to create sufficient pain to control the person. However, just causing pain may not work against some attackers.  They may be intoxicated, drugged up or just nut jobs that need to be put down and locked up as well as using pain to control them. That is where Mechanical techniques come in handy.

                Mechanical techniques are those that take advantage of both pain and the natural mechanical systems of the body. The techniques do cause pain but rather focus on the natural use of leverage and momentum to guide an aggressor and control their body. (examples such as the fold over, shoulder wrap, head twist, wrist/arm twist and other Aikido like controls) 

Pain is not always as damaging as other forms of self-protection

                When you use Pain compliance and Mechanical control techniques you do not often have to do as much damage as other self-protection techniques. You can address specific situations with the right level of response.  However if you simply learn to kick and punch you are left with just one tool that you have to use….striking.

                Lets put this to the test.  Two situations that may occur and how the proper response may not be a striking response. First situation….you are walking home late at night and you are accosted by a drunk….the guy kind of catches you off guard and is chest to chest with you asking for money, and your back is against a wall!  While he has invaded your space and is actually assaulting you by doing so…it A) may be difficult to generate enough power to actually get away from him and B) it probably will escalate the issue a lot and cause you more hassle than it’s worth.  Set up number two….you are at home/work and your family member/coworker/ student/customer starts to get very upset with something and is not rational. They have taken drugs/lost control of their emotional state or just plain lost it! You can hit them in the face hoping to knock them out but A) you will probably lose your job/freedom (get arrested for domestic violence) and B) you may harm them more than need be.

                Mechanical compliance and pain controls will help you out in these situations by creating a tool to control and disarm the aggressor and control them until you can get assistance or decide if you now have to escalate the reactions you are using to match their level of physical pressure they are putting on you.        

                Mechanical compliance and pain control techniques have been used by police, military and civilians for many years and prove to be very effective.  But the understanding of pain and biomechanics is essential to properly apply these techniques and have them be successful.

               

End notes

Pain and mechanical techniques are often seen as a less damaging alternative in situations where the lethality of a technique is not required. In training for self-preservation you should widen your training to include any techniques that get the job done for you and will bring you out breathing and whole from a violent situation.

As a martial artist you should be training in Atemi waza (Striking), Nage waza (Throwing), Shime Waza (Chokes), Ne waza (groundwork or grappling) and Kansetsu waza (Joint locks) to ensure that you are well rounded and able to handle any attack and any situations.

The understanding of pain and how it can affect an attacker and yourself is a vital component of any training program and should be used to help build your skill levels along with the well rounded approach to training.