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
This is a thing, its called nerve ablation. Its just not a common treatment.
The preferred treatment is called a nerve block and involves injecting a long lasting anesthetic into the nerve. Nerve block injections are cheap and can be done in an outpatient setting, regardless of what nerve is being targeted. On the other hand, nerve ablation is a reasonably complicated surgical procedure if its targeting a nerve in the peripheral nervous system and a very complicated, high risk procedure if its targeting a nerve in the central nervous system.
Ablating a nerve in the peripheral nervous system isn’t a permanent solution because the nerve will grow back after about a year. Nerve blocks don’t last that long, but again they’re much easier to do.
Because of the high cost/complexity/risk of nerve ablation, its very rarely done and only then in very severe cases where nerve blocks haven’t been effective.
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