Pain and Suffering in Invertebrates?

Pain and suffering in invertebrates?

All animals face hazards that cause tissue damage and most have nociceptive reflex responses that protect them from such damage. However, some taxa have also evolved the capacity for pain experience, presumably to enhance long-term protection through behavior modification based on memory of the unpleasant nature of pain. In this article I review various criteria that might distinguish nocicepti...

Sentience and Pain in Invertebrates

Pain and suffering

brings added value to the study of pain and suffering? For teachers like me who are planning to co-teach a course on religion and medicine, in my case to students from Harvard Medical School and from Harvard Divinity School, this collection is a step forward, but it would have been more helpful if it had set up an ongoing dialogue between its two parts, forcing scholars who are comfortable anal...

Conceptualizing suffering and pain

BACKGROUND This article aims to contribute to a better conceptualization of pain and suffering by providing non-essential and non-naturalistic definitions of both phenomena. Contributions of classical evidence-based medicine, the humanistic turn in medicine, as well as the phenomenology and narrative theories of suffering and pain, together with certain conceptions of the person beyond them (th...

Pain, avoidance, and suffering

In this issue of PAIN, Drs. Vlaeyen and Linton [2] present a cogent review of research regarding the fear-avoidance model of chronic musculoskeletal pain, a model that Dr. Vlaeyen has pioneered. The model was developed in order to explain how persistent fear-based avoidance behavior could produce much of the suffering and disability associated with pain states. They highlight the key role of fe...