Have you ever noticed, sometimes we have pain from the oddest little things? I’m sure you can relate. You bend over to pick up a small item and you end up with a sharp pain in your back, or you get a paper cut, or you turn to look over our shoulder and suddenly your neck hurts. The question is, did you really injure yourself? And if not, why was it so painful?
If we follow outdated wisdom, we hurt therefore we must have done some damage to the body; it follows that every time we hurt, we should be hurt. Conversely, no pain should mean we’re not injured. Yet, there are many examples that defy this logic.
I’m sure you’ve heard stories of people being crushed between two cars, experiencing no pain at all. What about the famous nail in the foot anecdote cited in the BMJ? In short, a British builder landed on a 15 cm nail, piercing his boot and causing him so much pain that strong opioids gave him no relief. Upon removal of the nail and the boot, it was discovered that the nail had simply passed between the toes completely missing his foot.
So why do we hurt? And why isn’t pain proportionate to the injury?
These are questions that modern pain scientists like famed Prof. Lorimer Moseley are exploring. The most cutting edge and modern answers lie in the primitive brain, the amygdala, whose main function is to keep us alive. It does so by relying on past experiences, trauma and injury to predict future danger.
At his lectures, Lorimer famously recounts a story of being bitten by a venomous snake while on a hike in the bush, in his native Australia. When bitten, he barely noticed anything, after all he had never experienced a venomous snake bite before. He simply assumed it must have been a twig or a blade of grass that grazed his leg and he continued walking. Not until his mates pointed out the venomous snake still attached to his thigh, did he experience any pain. (Luckily everything was sorted at a nearby hospital with anti-venom and he lived to tell the story.)
However, this was not the end of his snake story. The next time he was hiking through the bush, something sharp grazed his leg. Immediately his body responded in pain. When he looked down at his leg there was a mere scratch from a twig.
So why the pain response? After all he wasn’t injured.
His primitive brain processed the event as potentially life threatening, based on past experience. Pain is a most effective warning signal that one may be in danger. It’s a bit of a case of save the human; ask questions later. That’s a job for the thinking brain, which can process information in more detail, but it takes longer.
So how do we use this new knowledge to help us with our own pain and potentially reduce it? We’ll discuss that in our next post.
Until next time… ~ breathe ~ move ~ unwind ~
