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
There’s 2 main reasons for this:
1) You can end up damaging/removing things you still need.
Think of nerves like power lines. There can be lots of stuff running along there: power cables, telephone lines, cable, internet, etc. Removing a nerve because it’s sending pain signals you don’t need is like chopping down the entire power line because you don’t need cable anymore. *Technically* it can do the trick, but unless you can guarantee the only thing running along the power line was the cable wire you can mess up a bunch of other important stuff.
2) You still aren’t addressing how the brain is interpreting pain signals.
A nerve’s job is to send electrical signals to the brain which then decides what those signals mean. Sometimes the problem isn’t always with the nerve, but the brain being extra sensitive to certain signals. Google something called “phantom limb syndrome”. The ELI5 for that one is that people who lose arms and legs still feel like those limbs “hurt” long after they’ve lost them.
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