Why doctors can’t just remove the pain nerves in an area with chronic pain?

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So, there are pain nerves, right? Different from the movement nerves. Normally you want to have functional pain nerves so they can alert your brain to an injury. If someone has, say, arthritis, or a bad joint or bone injury 30 years ago that has long since healed, those nerves are just sounding the alarm 24/7 even though there’s nothing to be done about it. So, since that pain isn’t giving you any new information you can use to help take care of your body, and is actively impeding your life, why not just remove the pain nerves, or cut them off from the nervous system? They are useless at that point for actually reporting things that would impede the mechanical function of that area, so getting rid of them would be a net benefit.

In: Biology

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The OPQ assumes that a foot pain starts in the foot. That isn’t always true.

I can’t give you a medical explanation for it, but my wife’s grandfather had his legs amputated just below the knees. He lived another 10 years but his feet hurt the rest of his life. Somewhere in his brain, he was still processing the pain that has existed before the amputation. That was 30 years ago and maybe the doctors have a solution now, but they did not then.

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