I’ve had a colonoscopy (without pain relief) where they took biopsies. The doctors said the biopsies wouldn’t hurt because the colon couldn’t feel pain, and they were indeed painless. The amount of air they pumped in was horrifically painful however.
Trapped gas sounds trivial, but can also be extremely painful. Ulcerative colitis also hurts. So does diarrhoea.
So how do these pain mechanisms work? What causes the pain, if the interior of the colon is unfeeling?
In: Biology
There are muscle fibers on the outside of your colon that help with peristaltism. A gas filled colon makes this fibers stretch and that’s where the pain is coming from.
[removed]
Part of the intestines are covered in a thin layer of extremely sensitive tissue called the peritoneum. When gas presses your intestine it also presses that thin layer and that’s why it hurts so bad.
The reason why you don’t feel every gas or growth (cancer) is that the obstruction needs to be of quite great mass so that it stretches the peritoneum to much.
I’m not sure about Colitis and Diarrhea. I’m guessing Colitis hurts because instead of pressurizing nerves cells are actually dying.
Diarrhea could hurt because your body is applying the pressure to get whatever you ate out of your body.
Nocioceptors are the sensory neurons that we call pain receptors. There are several different types. Not all types of receptors are present in all places of the body. The ones in the colon can sense mechanical stress (i.e., distention from gas), inflammation, and ischemia (tissue death). Gas can cause pain because it’s physically putting pressure on your colon, and inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis cause inflammation, which will also trigger those nerves.
Hi Everyone,
Please read rule 3 (and the rest really) before participating. This is a pretty strict sub, and we know that. Rule 3 covers 3 main things that are really relevant here:
* No Joke Answers (I know the question involves a butt, but still)
* No Anecdotes
* No Off Topic comments
This only applies at top level, your top level comment needs to be a direct explanation to the question in the title, child comments (comments that are replies to comments) are fair game so long as you don’t break rule 1 (Be Nice).
I do hope you guys enjoy the sub and the post otherwise though.
If you have questions you can let us know here or in mod mail, or if you have suggestions for the sub we also have r/IdeasForELI5 as basically our suggestions box.
We just talked about this in class yesterday!! So you dont have pain receptors in your gut but you do have a lot of baroreceptors or pressure receptors to tell you when the pressure gets too high and response of high pressure from these is essentially translated as pain
As it swells it starts pushing on other muscles, organs, and lining that does have nerves.
It’s like a person who is too big for an airplane seat who is pushing into the other person. The big person is mostly fine but the other person now is uncomfortable and tells the stewards what’s wrong
A simple way to think of the colon and pain is to relate it to the skin. Lots of different things can cause different types of pain in the skin. There’s pressure, heat, cold, cuts and probably a few more. There is a specific type of nerve ending to sense each type of pain.
The colon (the entire intestine, in fact) has only two types of pain receptors – ones that sense stretching, and ones that sense lack of oxygen (which happens when the colon is starved of blood). Trapped gas will make the colon wider, which sets off the stretching pain receptors. Biopsies don’t hurt because the colon lacks the nerve endings to sense cuts and bruises.
[removed]
Víscera like the intestine, kidneys, liver, lungs etc, have non precise pain receptors on the outer layer. That’s why this kind of pain is diffuse and not very precise. This means that there is no pain in the inside. That’s why a tumor doesn’t hurt until it affects the outside layer, either by stretching or damaging it. In the case of the intestines, they get stretched causing pain.
Latest Answers