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
In addition to the other mechanisms described, these are actually important diagnostically for different conditions as we learn in medical school.
Pain from stretching of abdominal organs generally causes what we call “visceral pain”–this is generally deep, squeezing, discomfortable pain that’s not really well localized to a single spot, since the way that those sensory nerves run doesn’t allow you to easily tell where exactly the pain is.
On the other hand, if you have really sharp, stabbing pain in a particular spot of the abdomen, this is because something is damaging the peritoneum (the thin tissue lining the abdominal wall on the inside). This is innervated with sensory nerves more similar to the ones on your skin, so you can localize it well. This is usually a pretty big red flag, because it means there’s some kind of disease processing happening *outside* of the gastrointestinal tract, like a ruptured bowel, a really swollen/burst appendix, etc.
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