This sentence contains a whole lot of information. If elaborated upon, it means and implicates the following:

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Pain is unpleasant
Under normal circumstances, one tries to avoid pain, or if incurred, one wants to do something about it, like taking pain killers, seeking medical help, or avoiding movements or positions that bring pain on or make it worse (e.g. limping).

Pain is a sensory experience
When pain receptors are stimulated in the body, like touching a very hot object with your hand, the pain stimulus is transferred along the peripheral nervous system into the spinal cord and up to the brain. This allows the body to react appropriately, e.g. the brain sends a signal back to the appropriate part of the body, in this case to withdraw the hand from the hot object to prevent being burnt.

Pain is an emotional experience
Some people experience pain without there being any actual tissue damage or other clearly definable physical cause.

Backache is a very common example of this. Several patients seek medical help for pain they feel in their back for which numerous investigations are done, but nothing abnormal is ever found. They go from specialist to specialist, from treatment to treatment, but nobody can help, and all treatments fail. They get despondent and depressed, which makes their pain worse, and in the end the pain dominates their lives.

They are upset if anybody mentions that it is “all in their mind”. And indeed, it is not in their mind. They do indeed feel back pain, but the cause is not a slipped disc or any other local problem that can be corrected by surgery or manipulation or physiotherapy. The problem is brought on by something that affected the person emotionally, like the loss of a family member or inability to cope at work, and that the body brings to the outside in the form of back pain.

The treatment must therefore not only focus on pain killers and the back alone, but also on defining the original emotional problem and treating it accordingly.

Classical western medicine unfortunately often forgets that the human being is not just a collection of independent organs put together under one skin. Those organs all relate to each other, so that, for example, a disturbance in your emotional state might not present as a classical “brain” problem like depression or anxiety, but rather like a pain somewhere in your body, or might make an existing pain worse.

Pain is a warning signal for actual or potential tissue damage
When the body has been damaged, like a cut or a fracture, pain is experienced. Also, pain is a warning signal and lets the body know that if nothing is done, the body is at risk for damage, for example when touching a very hot object.

This allows the body to heal or prevent suffering harmful damage. Imagine you would not experience pain after breaking a bone: you would still move around happily with the broken bone, which would then never have time to heal. Also, if you didn’t feel pain when touching a very hot object, you would burn yourself, with tissue getting damaged and dying off, may be leading to local or generalised infection, with death as the final outcome!

Links:
Arthritis Foundation of South Africa
Multiple Sclerosis South Africa
The South African Society of Physiotherapy

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