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

I suffered knee trauma 20 years ago…and I asked why it never stopped hurting even though it’s long since healed. And they said something about nerves always firing signals…and there is nothing they can do. I just have to live with the pain.

Sometimes I feel like cutting off my leg would be the better option. If I ever do get rich enough…I will seriously try to get someone to make my knee stop hurting.

I mean, I’m used to the pain by now. But it feels…worse and worse as I age. And the weather changes make it such that some days my knee is soo stiff it’s hard to walk on it at all. It’d be nice to find some relief. But I’m already resolved to the fact that it’s always going to hurt.

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