How are our bodies able to differentiate between cuts, burns, punctures, bruises, scratches etc through pain and how do they heal differently?
In: Biology
So this is really cool actually. As far as different feelings of pain:
Our body has different receptors on nerves that tell our brain what is going on. So we have something happen to us like a cut, those nerves get stimulated and tell our brain.
So for example, the way we tell temperature is through “thermoreceptors”. These nerves are activated by heat. Something really cool is that we have thermoreceptors in our tongue that can tell we are eating something hot like coffee or hot pizza. When we eat spicy foods, they actually activate those SAME thermoreceptors which then we perceive as “hot”.
We have other ones like “mechanoreceptors” which detect stretching or “nociceptors” that detect pain that all give our brain a good idea of what’s going on.
As for healing:
As soon as there is damage, our body responds by stopping any bleeding that’s caused and getting immune cells over to the area to try and fight any dangerous microbes that could get in from the injury. This is call inflammation.
Your body will also direct growth of new blood vessels into the area in order to bring in nutrients and other things that the still living cells can use to divide and replace all the cells that had died. By doing so our body is able to heal itself by replacing dead cells with new ones.
That was a bit long and I hope it was at least a little helpful. I’m still just a medical student but this kind of stuff is super cool to me. If I’ve made any mistakes let me know!
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