Whenever breaking a bone or spraining something or things of that nature, PTs and orthopedists always say “if it doesn’t hurt it’s fine.”
What would be scenarios where pain (or lack thereof) DOESN’T properly let you know if something is fully healed or injured or not?
In: Biology
When I snapped my arm in half it didn’t hurt at all. Nerve damage can lead to no pain, and is pretty serious. Disease such as leprosy can lead to lack of pain, leading to unnoticed injuries and infections.
Some people actually do have conditions that cause them to not have pain! And it’s actually quite dangerous—if you can’t feel pain, you can’t feel if you’re injured, or if something is infected. There’d need to be extra caution. I mean, if you’re walking and you step on glass, we’d feel it. Somebody with no pain who didn’t see glass on the floor who steps on it—well, they don’t feel it. They keep walking. The glass is still in their foot, probably being jostled about. It could hit a vessel and they could bleed out a lot. It could hit a tendon or nerve and result in permanent damage. Even if they’re lucky in that front, once it’s removed and stitched up, they might not notice that there’s an infection in the bottom of their foot. It’s a difficult place to see and they can’t feel the pain. Fractured a tooth? Can’t feel it so now it’s infected. Bitten your tongue? No initial pain response means the bite may be more severe. What about food? A sharp piece of food stuck in your throat? Or, consistently eating or drinking food too hot because you can’t feel the pain? That could damage the oesophagus. Even acid reflux—if you never feel it burn your throat, you never notice the damage. Long term, that’s a cancer risk. What about appendicitis? Can’t feel pain, so….welp, less warning I’d imagine.
And some people for some reason have far too much pain! For some people, even a light touch on the skin causes a pain reaction.
I’m somebody who has a level of chronic pain, and it generally means that I have a higher than average but not freakishly high pain tolerance—and this has led to me dismissing injuries and thinking that I’m probably being dramatic, then finding out that actually, I was in a worse condition than I thought. I’m talking dislocation, btw. Resulted in me walking on a freshly dislocated joint up flights of stairs with a heavy backpack, no pain meds. Now that joint is unstable (well…more unstable than the rest of my joints). Chronic pain is wild when you find out that the normal level of pain to be in is zero. So you don’t even need a complete absence of pain to struggle to know the nature of an injury.
Nah that’s utter bullshit. Clean non complicated fractures don’t hurt much if at all at rest.
absence of pain is no good indicator. An accident could have also damaged the nerves for that area making it impossible to feel pain there, degree of pain varies massively between people. Someone with severe endometriosis who’s in debaliting passing out level pain will barely blink upon a sprained ankle, but someone who’s not experiencing those high amounts of pain frequently might not be able to walk on it.
If a burn is deep enough it’ll destroy the sensory nerves, so you won’t feel pain. That’s when first responders and doctors get scarred!
Not really. Pain is really subjective and can make your body send out different chemicals to counteract it in certain ways (like shock) and it’s generally not that accurate.
It’s like comparing a papercut to breaking something, sometimes breaking a whole ass bone doesn’t hurt much, but yet a papercut can bring you to your knees.
Pain isn’t a good indicator of anything, really. That initial jolt to make you let go of something hot, ok, totally functional there. But some bad things don’t hurt at all, some pain is way worse than the injury would warrant, chronic pain can be excruciating and the injury is long gone.
How bad pain feels is also situational. On adrenaline you might not feel it at all, in the right setting it might feel good, and when you can’t escape it, even a “small” pain can become torture.
There are situations where people do feel pain after physical injuries are healed. So the presence of pain is not always an accurate signal of a limitation to activity, but rather indicates a need to investigate. For long-lasting pain, patients may be instructed about differences between *hurt* and *harm*, and need to try to do activities even though they are painful, under medical supervision.
For new pain, though, usually there’s some injury.
I’ve heard anecdotally that sometimes people with stress fractures don’t initially experience as much pain as you would expect but the pain will tend to worsen if activity continues.
As a whole, pain is not a wholly accurate sign of severity or presence of injury, but medical professionals can use the level of pain along with context of the injury and other symptoms to make good predictions of what has happened.
Back in November, I full on tore my hamstring tendon up by my butt while stretching. Heard the pop and everything. It… just kind of ached a little bit. Absolutely no pain or discomfort in the events leading up to it.
Nowadays, it doesn’t acutely *hurt,* but I get a very definite sense of ‘If you continue this movement, this tendon is going to rupture’ because I hit a limit of how far the leg can actually move. I 100% cannot rely on pain as an indication of whether I should or shouldn’t do something with that leg.
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