Threshold pain
The threshold of pain or pain threshold is the point along a curve of increasing perception of a stimulus at which pain begins to be felt. It is the point at which sensation becomes pain. For example, imagine someone is tapping on your arm and taps progressively harder. Eventually, the tapping will become hard enough to hurt, and that is when it has reached your pain threshold. Some people have much higher pain thresholds than do other people.
There are a number of differences that researchers have looked at as far as pain thresholds. Differences may be based on your age, your race, your gender. Pain thresholds vary from person to person and are abnormally low in fibromyalgia (FMS). People that suffer with Fibromyalgia have a low threshold and most often a very high tolerance to pain. This is partly true because they have been found to have greatly increased levels of substance P in the cerebral spinal fluid. Substance P is a neuromodulator (a substance that changes neurotransmitter effectiveness) that allows us to perceive a stimulus as painful
If we focus on gender, we know that across the lifespan, women may experience pain very differently based upon where they are in their menstrual cycle. At certain times of a women’s menstrual cycle, she may be more expressive of pain. She may be at more at risk for experiencing pain. When a person puts their hand in experimental pain model, they put their hand in cold water, they remove their hand when they can’t tolerate it anymore, and all of a sudden you see varied differences based on whether someone is older, younger, minority, or woman, or man.
Nonetheless, one thing that we absolutely know is that regardless of how experimental pain is shown or not shown that people have higher or lower thresholds for pain, we know that pain is undertreated.
