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
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.
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