Imagine an orchestra in your brain. It plays all kinds of harmonious melodies, then pain comes along and the different sections of the orchestra are reduced to a few pain tunes.

All pain is real. And for many people it is a debilitating part of everyday life.

It is now known that understanding more about why things hurt can actually help people to overcome their pain. Recent advances in fields such as neurophysiology, brain imaging, immunology, psychology and cellular biology have provided an explanatory platform from which to explore pain. In everyday language accompanied by quirky illustrations, Explain Pain discusses how pain responses are produced by the brain: how responses to injury from the autonomic motor and immune systems in your body contribute to pain, and why pain can persist after tissues have had plenty of time to heal.

Explain Pain aims to give clinicians and people in pain the power to challenge pain and to consider new models for viewing what happens during pain. Once they have learnt about the processes involved they can follow a scientific route to recovery.