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Thoughts for the pessimists
What makes your brain tick?
According to researchers, any part of your body, if you don't use it you lose
it, and particularly your brain, the more you use it the more brainy you become.
What Is Pain?
Is there a scientific way in diagnosing pain?
Though the short answer is
'No', but pain does have a purpose, it is usually the result of something
having gone wrong with our body, read on:
What Courses Phantom Pain?
Pain experienced from a part of the body that no longer exists.
Around
two-thirds of people who have had limbs amputated report intense sensations
apparently originating from where the limb used to be.
This so-called phantom pain has nothing to do with any discomfort from the
amputation procedure.
It can be very distressing, however, often persisting
for many years after a damaged or diseased body part has been removed.
The explanation for it may be that the brain becomes confused by the lack of
input from the absent part of the body.
Health Tip:
Much more common but no less bizarre is the phenomenon of referred pain,
where pain is perceived as coming from a part of the body other than the one
in trouble.
For example, the pain of a heart attack is often felt in the left shoulder,
arm or hand.
And recently, it's emerged that women experience the pain of a
heart attack differently from men - often they misinterpret it as a sports
injury, possibly involving the back.
Why referred pain occurs is unclear. It may be because nerves from both
regions feed into a common pool of neurons, or that the origin of the signal
becomes confused by the brain.
What's The Point Of Pain?
Pains may be unpleasant but it does have a purpose.
Medical science has
recorded around one hundred instances of a genetic defect called congenital
analgesia, which leaves people unable to feel pain.
They have to navigate their way through life trying not to do things that
would cause an injury - because they have no way of telling if they are
suffering from one.
The best documented case of congenital analgesia was of the daughter of a
Canadian doctor who soon developed severe damage to her knees, hips and
spine, because she never felt any knocks or bumps.
Her father recalled how one day she knelt on a boiling hot radiator during
the freezing Canadian winter without recoiling - and bore the scars on her
knees for the rest of her short life.
A life of repetitive minor injury soon took its toll. Damaged tissue in the
girl's wrists, knees and ankles become a breeding ground for bacteria, which
ate through to the bone.
She died of a virtually untreatable bone infection, osteomyelitis, aged just 22.
Such extreme cases have an important lesson for the rest of us: don't take
pain-killers for symptoms that last for more than a day or so.
Pain is
usually the result of something having gone wrong with our body - so taking
pain-killers regularly is like switching off a burglar alarm before checking
whether or not your home has actually be burgled.
What's the moral in these stories?
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