What is the relationship between comfort and pain?
Comfort is a larger umbrella term compared to pain. As stated above, there are three types of comfort: relief, ease, and transcendence. Relief is the absence of specific previous discomforts, a common one being pain which can be of varying intensity. Pain that has a physical origin also is influenced by psychospiritual, sociocultural, and environmental factors. I define pain as a multidimensional discomfort including sensory, cognitive, and affective components (Melzak & Wall, 1982). It is a specific sensation in the body that “hurts” with a varying degree of intensity (for example, from mild to severe or from 1 to 10). The discomfort of pain is often a significant detractor from comfort. Looking at pain holistically, pain is intensified by lonliness, fear, anxiety, noxious stimuli, anger, etc.
