I get why feeling pain is important for us, but why does the body not get used to chronik pain? I dont need to get reminded that my knee hurts for 10 years.
Wouldnt it be smarter if the brain is like: “This nerve is sending me constant signals about pain for years, i should just cut it off”.
In: Biology
Pain is an alarm signal, something is wrong when there is pain. In chronic pain, the alarm signal is behaving correctly, there’s often an injury or an inflammation or some structural cause which the alarm is going off to tell you about. Just, we can’t fix the underlying cause sometimes.
My guess would be it doesn’t shut off because the actual system of pain to inform us of bad things happening isn’t the thing misbehaving.
Pain itself isn’t a specific signal, it’s an over or under sent along the nerve, or a disrupted signal, it’s more a check of hey, this isn’t doing the right thing. The check is a good thing, and beyond a nerve block is fulfilling the purpose of telling the body something is wrong, turning it off would be dangerous because injury can still occur to the impacted site, alarm system still needs to do it’s job.
But you can normalise chronic pain – I have chronic spinal headaches, spasticity pain, general nerve pain. It never goes away, even with my meds, but I can tolerate it for much much longer than when it first happened. The pain hasn’t decreased, but my perception of it has changed due to signals like ‘urgency’ and ‘fear’ associated with normal pain being decreased. So some things do get turned off.
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