Why does the sight of blood etc make people feel sick, seeing it not suffering an injury?

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Interested to know what causes that reaction. Not the person suffering the injury but people who see it. Doesn’t affect all people and you can get desensitised but what is it about the sight of inside stuff that makes you feel sick?

In: Biology

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think to answer this question in a way that represents all crowds is impossible, but for the most part it just stems down to instinctual reactions and developed behaviour.

At the end of the day, blood is not designed to just be leaking out of a body. As such for a lot of people it’s the idea of the process that freaks them out, not because of the intrinsic properties of blood itself. Blood in itself is also a very unique fluid, it’s thicker than water and also comes out in many hues. Knowing someone is profusely bleeding is also concerning, as frankly even adding pressure to a wound is unlikely to be enough to save them (they would need surgery). As such this whole process probably does make a majority of people discomforted by it.

When it comes to other people’s bodily fluids etc, we are already quite predisposed ourselves to be disgusted by them so it’s not a shocker that blood is another thing we’d be bothered by. Exposure to blood as a whole, whether it be an animals or in the field of medical or an injury, tends to desensitise yourself to the matter as you can rationalise it.

In short, theirs no organ or specific region of the brain that you’re born with that’s purely responsible for it – we develop it through reactionary instincts and our rationalisation of a situation. Some of us will have to try and rationalise and overcome these things to ourselves in our lives, others will choose to avoid them.

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