This can also go for things like pimples. Anyone?
In: Biology
Most likely a mixture of something called the Placebo Effect and how your brain registers pain. When you cut yourself, sensors in your body tell your brain that there is damage to that part and in response your brain sends back messages which is what ‘pain’ is. A small cut is obviously not a lot of damage, so in reality the brain doesn’t need to go crazy telling you there’s a problem.
However, when you look at the cut that’s when I think the placebo effect happens. Because you now are fully aware of the cut, and it doesn’t particularly look nice, the cut ends up being the focus of your thoughts and because your more aware of the cut, your brain is sending more signals to say there’s damage.
The placebo effect is interesting because it shows that pain, side effects of medicine and illness a lot more to do with how you feel mentally rather than how bad the illness is.
You can look up the study for yourself but a doctor took 2 groups of people and gave them water pills, 1 group they told the pill would give you head aches and other small pains and the other group was told nothing would happen. The group which had been told the pill had side effects would then complain to the doctor the pill is causing these problems, and the ones that were told nothing would happen.. well, they reported nothing. They are just water pills after all. This study proves that if you think something is painful, then it WILL be painful. The study is obviously much more complex than that and some of the details might have been a bit different but that’s the basic idea of it. It’s like that one family member that is ALWAYS has a cold or ALWAYS has the flu or whatever. Maybe they do, but tweaking their mentality could go a long way to making them feel healthier.
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