Pain, an essential protection for the body.
"You cannot imagine a human being living entirely without pain."
Deprived of that function, as happens in conditions such as Congenital Insensitivity to Pain, the risk of injury, more or less serious, is constant. Pain has a function: it warns, it protects.
Just like immunity or inflammation, both essential to the body's defense.
Inflammation makes a diseased or injured area painful 🤕.
Like the barriers around a construction site, it serves to prevent a second accident, or an intrusion.
To be able to treat, we have to fool the alarm system.
Pain is also useful for diagnosis. But we, who repair and sometimes act as emergency clinicians for the mouth and teeth, have to fool that alarm system in order to treat our patient.
The aim of ZerØ Pain Dentistry is therefore not to remove a function that protects us all, but to eliminate every unnecessary pain tied to the medical act.
Zero unnecessary pain, tied to the medical act?
"On the pain scale, there is more distance between 0 and 1 than between 1 and 10."
For a simple reason:
Zero multiplied by 2, 5, 10, will always be ZerØ. Whereas... Even when the stimulus seems light and harmless to us, such as a periodontal probe inserted only 3 mm, the patient's reaction can take us by surprise. The painful response, controlled by the brain, that is to say by the descending pain pathways, is uncoupled from the intensity of the stimulus, and equally from whether or not there is any lesion we can objectify.
That is why reducing to ZerØ the pain tied to the medical act matters more than ever.
See also the videos:
- Pain always has a function
- Zero pain as a goal