ABSTRACT
The humane use of preclinical animal models plays a critical role both in understanding the basic biology of pain as well as in the development of therapeutic treatments to alleviate pain. Clinically relevant pain is the result of complex processes involving peripheral transduction and transmission as well as central modulation and processing that leads to the nal conscious sensation of pain. Much has been learned about the mechanisms underlying the transduction and transmission of the pain signal within the nervous system through the use of cellular, biochemical, and molecular techniques (Millan 1999; Scholz and Woolf 2007; Zeilhofer 2005). However, understanding the actual experience of pain will always require an intact organism that can integrate the full range of external stimuli and internal cognitive and emotional states that drive and modulate pain.
