When we are in danger, our first reaction is to call for help in some way. Did you know that our body can send similar distress signals when it is in “danger”? How is pain sensation produced? Pain can be divided into two kinds of injury perception and neuropathic, the basic formation process of injury perception pain is as follows: when the body is hurt by the outside world, the nervous system will be like an electrical signal, we are stimulated through the spinal cord, brain, thalamus, and finally reach the brain’s sensory cortex, thus producing pain. When it comes to pain we all like to be comfortable, no one likes pain, we used to think that as long as it hurts it is bad, so is all pain bad? There are good people and bad people in pain, we face often sciatica, brain pain, headache, stomach pain, toothache and so on are bad pain, long-term chronic pain is bad pain, and good pain is the alarm system of the human body, it is often in a dangerous situation to tell people to go to the doctor in time to avoid the danger in time. How many people are suffering from chronic pain in the cities where we live? Epidemiological surveys in the pain discipline show that around the adult population in developed countries suffers from chronic pain, and by analogy, the number of chronic pain sufferers in Beijing is as high as five or six million. Among the various kinds of bad pains, toothache can be said to be quite common. There was once such an extreme case of an old man who relied on continuous tooth extraction to relieve his toothache, and a mouthful of teeth were extracted and still did not relieve the symptoms. The pain department’s examination results showed that his symptoms were actually of an often overlooked, but actually quite representative condition – trigeminal nerve pain. Why is trigeminal neuralgia so similar to toothache and easily confused? The first branch is called the ophthalmic nerve, which is distributed to the eyeballs and the part of the forehead above the eyebrows; the second branch is called the maxillary nerve, which is distributed to the nose, face, and the alveolus, and this nerve is responsible for the pain of our upper teeth; and the third branch is called the mandibular nerve, which is responsible for the lower teeth, including the tongue. It is because the trigeminal nerve is directly distributed around the teeth that its lesions are easily misdiagnosed as simple toothache and treatment is delayed. There is a relatively simple way how we can distinguish between simple toothache and trigeminal nerve pain: If you have a toothache at home and it is not convenient to seek immediate medical attention, many of your friends will take some direct emergency measures, such as taking pain-relieving and anti-inflammatory drugs, using ice cubes to ice, or containing salt water to gargle, using ginger and pepper on the painful area, etc. These methods are proven to have a certain alleviating effect on acute toothache, but if If they don’t work, they can indicate to a certain extent that you may have a neuropathic toothache and need to seek medical attention. What other parts of the toothache may be signaling us for help? In another extreme case treated, a grandmother passed away three days after the onset of a sore throat and toothache because they were not taken seriously in time, a dangerous signal from another symptom that could be confused with a simple toothache – cardiac toothache.