How come a paralyzingly spine break shuts down pain/muscle operation, but not organs and other bodily functions?

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In the case of a spinal break that causes someone to become paralyzed, why would organs and other bodily functions un-affected if the cause is a separation of the brain’s ability to communicate with the body? Does the brain not also subconsciously control breathing, heart beat, etc?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Think about it like this

Your spine has a lot of nerves in it. Its effectively a giant stick with strings coming out of it at different points that tell different parts of your body what to do

The higher you go, the more important the bodypart. The lower you go, the less important the body part

Something like control of the lower limbs can be lost and you can still maybe survive to have kids. This is true maybe even for upper limbs, although less so

However, if you became unable to breathe, then ho boy you’re probably not going to survive

For this reason, over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, the human body basically sorted the spine so that the most expendable functions were at the lower portion of the spine – where we are most likely to sustain damage

Of course, there are a lot of exceptions, like the heart, which can pump itself. Hopefully this cleared things up!

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