Traditional Chinese Medicine for Visceral Pain

Visceral pain is a common clinical condition that may be induced by stimuli such as mechanical stretching, spasm, ischemia, and inflammation. Compared with somatic pain, the mechanisms of generation, maintenance, and regulation of visceral pain are more complex, and therefore it is one of the key points and difficulties in the field of basic pain research at present. Visceral pain exhibits the following clinical characteristics: (1) vague location; (2) often accompanied by referred pain; (3) usually with reflex behaviors such as muscle contraction; (4) not exclusively caused by injury to internal organs; (5) insensitive to distending and pulling stimuli; (6) slow onset and lasting for a long time, that is, chronic pain with progressive intensification, but sometimes rapidly progressing to severe pain; and (7) particularly prone to ignite unpleasant emotions and accompanied by nausea, vomiting, and cardiovascular and respiratory changes.