why does a toothache seems unbearable compared to any other body ache?
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Because you haven’t yet experienced other pains. For example, you haven’t had gout yet. Or, you know, other things that hurt worse than dental pain. Dental pain is significant, and best avoided (that is why it is pain), but your assessment of it being the worst is naive. To paraphrase Homer, it’s your worst pain SO FAR. .
A toothache is unbearable because the pain is so intense. It feels like a sharp, stabbing pain that is hard to ignore.
Maybe it has something to do with the nerve endings being so close to the brain/sensory organs, and the whole ear nose and throat connections? Lot of nerves meeting up in the head. Punishes us in ways that impede our general sense of functioning, like pain near or “behind” the eye with the shooting pain from the nerve or something? I dunno.
Pain is a really weird one. Tooth-pain may be specifically bad because it’s in your head, and unlike a lot of the rest of your body you can’t move it or adjust it in anyway to alleivate the pressure / pain or even distract yourself.
I sometimes get Trigeminal Neurlagia, which is when the trigeminal nerve in your face (along the cheekbone and the jaw) become extremely painful, your teeth are very close to this and a lot of other facial nerves. This likely impacts the levels of pain as well.
The tooth is also filled with the ‘nerve’ or dental pulp, and it doesn’t have a great circulatory system. So, if you wack your leg your blood can rush to the impacted area and produce a healing response, which calms down the body’s ‘alarm’ pain signal. But, your teeth don’t have this facility so the ‘alarm’ signal might last much longer.
So, I’m not a dentist or a doctor but a mix of near by complex nervous systems, inability to alleivate pain by movement and the fact the blood supply to the teeth is different than the blood supply to other areas.
As someone whose had a tooth infection, in the middle of intense cancer treatments, I feel uniquely equipped to answer this. The reason it feels like “the worst pain” is because it’s inside your face and, worse even, inside your mouth. There is no ignoring it. There isn’t even a way to dissociate comfortably while it’s happening.
Your head is where your brain lives. It’s where your thoughts live. It’s where you live.
Your mouth never stops moving, whether you like it or not. Your tongue and your jaw muscles are always flexing and tweaking.
It’s truly unbearable.
It’s easier to ignore the pain of a needle going through your spine, than into your face, trust me.
It doesn’t, though. There are far more painful experiences, especially acute pain, whereas tooth pain tends to be dull and easier to move to the background.
Physician here. Pain is completely relative to an individual. I’ve taken care of grandmas in their 80s and 90s who don’t even flinch when I poke a needle into their artery to do special blood tests (it’s a lot more painful than a regular blood draw and I can corroborate from my own experience of a friend doing it to me). Then, I’ll do the same test on a 28 year old man and they’ll be freaking out and even had young guys cry.
I’ve even seen an 88 year old grandma barely “wince” when an orthopedist put her dislocated shoulder back into place, and she didn’t want pain meds or anything else to take the edge off. I’ll never forget that lady, she was cracking jokes with me afterward saying she’s humpty dumpty and so silly for tripping and dislocating it in the first place. 😂
Point is, a toothache can be very painful for some, and merely “annoying” or “irritating” to others. People have different pain thresholds, different pain tolerances, and different ways of coping with it when it occurs. A woman who has experienced childbirth often uses that as a measuring stick for other types of pain, since childbirth ranks up there (I’m told, and from what I’ve seen as a male physician). Another one I hear people saying as the worst pain of their life are kidney stones and gout.
If you’ve not had something more painful than a toothache, then sure, it will rank up there for ya. It tends to be on the more painful side due to the constant irritation to the nerve (mouth movement, air moving around the teeth, chewing, clenching, tongue pushing on the tooth etc.) which stimulates the pain sensation to the brain. But again, take two people with similar tooth problems and one may feel significantly more pain than the other.
Hope this helps answer your question.
Its because the nerves all along your jaw get activated by accident, even if its only one tooth, it feels like the whole mouth sending that same signal.
You’ve never had a hemorrhoid operation. It is bad before the operation and insanely bad afterwards. But once it is all over, sweet, sweet relief.
I think it’s because it’s all nerve. I’ve broken bones, had gout, and they all are terrible. I once stomped down the garbage and had a broken glass come in through the side of my shoe directly into the nerve bundle in the ball of my foot. It was the most excruciating pain I’d ever felt, UNTIL I had a tooth go bad. That tooth pain just short circuits your brain until it’s fixed.
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