For example, I cut my arm and I immediately feel pain. Pain is there to notify me that something is wrong or that I’m injured, but now that I’m aware and that I’ve taken care of it (say poured some disinfecant and wrapped it up) why do I still feel that pain. Why can’t our brain know that the wound is not dangerous anymore?
In: 2
How your injury looks is a poor indication of how healed/dangerous it is (you cannot see what it’s like internally, and you can’t see it externally either if you cover it up with bandage).
Others have already said that the continuing pain is to prevent you from further hurting yourself until the injury is healed (without the pain you’d likely move your injured part around, thus slowing the healing process).
Pain signals are important for us to survive everyday life. It prevents us from doing things like biting the tip of our tongue off, burning ourselves on hot surfaces, fracturing our bones due to constantly bumping into things, not noticing foreign objects in our eyes and thus damaging our vision, not noticing infections, etc.
There are people who have a rare condition called congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP), also known as congenital analgesia. These people cannot feel/react to pain so they have to try to monitor themselves to avoid things like I just described above. Unfortunately, this is very difficult and most die in childhood due to missed infections and injuries that us pain-feeling folks would’ve noticed long before they became fatal.
Take some pain medication to dull the pain if need be, but appreciate the importance of what pain signals are doing for you.
Latest Answers