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
A very simple answer here..
Simply if nerves are removed it can cause a whole new set of problems! Doctors are trained to take care of the problem at hand not to create new problems.
A Doctor’s Oath
Primum non nocere – First, Do no Harm!
Not to mention if nerves are removed this can cause harm because you can hurt yourself badly and in theory you may never know it. Until it’s to late that is..
Had a friend in university with what was then called [Reflex Sypathetic Dystrophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_regional_pain_syndrome) caused by having her foot crushed.
The pain started as a burning in her foot and moved up her leg. They cut the nerve chain in her knee and it stopped her being able to feel the burning, but her leg also lost the ability to cool itself – she stopped sweating below the cut.
Unfortunately it didn’t prevent the spread of the disease and a year later they cut the nerve chain in her groin. Same side effect – strange clammy not sweaty skin on that leg.
We didn’t stay in touch after university, but I heard she passed from it a couple years later. 🙁
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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