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
Other users have given great answers but they’ve all missed something significant: Substantial pain processing happens in the central nervous system as well (and we can’t remove that) AND that part of the nervous system becomes hyperactive, basically telling you that you’re in pain (often severe pain) even with little or even zero painful input.
An analogy might be stubbing your toe once; it probably hurts but it will go away. If you instead hit it with a hammer really hard 10 times over 10 days, you’ll probably really change your behavior to deal with that toe. On the 11th day, you’ll still be keenly aware of the damage done to your toe and it will still be extra sensitive, even if nothing happened to it that day. During long term chronic pain, your nervous system is constantly in that “11th day” pain state, where it’s super sensitive to any type of stimulation.
Source: I’m a chronic pain treatment researcher
Latest Answers