Pain is one of the most unpleasant feelings that a person has to experience in general. However, it will not be superfluous to remember that pain is the very signal that shows us that not everything is in order with our body. The inability to feel pain is a serious problem that worsens the quality of life. Approximately one person in a million is unable to feel pain. They suffer from an innate insensitivity to pain associated with the presence of a mutation in their genome.
For some reason, apparently, for many people with chronic pain, the volume was too loud and stayed too long. This is called central sensitization and likely plays at least some role in many chronic pain conditions. This is another example of how chronic pain does not necessarily mean permanent or chronic harm to the body.
When the body is working well, the damaged tissue will heal as much as possible after a few weeks or months, and then the pain should be over. Why should this continue when the body has already done its best to heal it? When pain continues for long periods of time without any real source of permanent harm or damage, there may be a problem with the pain processing system rather than the body. In other words, if you have chronic pain, there is at least some chance that you are not in a lot of pain.
One such patient is Ashlyn Blocker. She goes to school and lives with her parents in one of the cities in Georgia. She explains that she can feel touch, but does not feel pain. She can hold hot objects in her hands, does not notice wounds, cuts, pricks and insect bites. It may seem that this is not so bad, but in fact, the health of Ashlyn and all other patients with such a violation is in serious danger - without feeling the pain from the wounds, they can bleed out or get serious burns.
Research shows that for some people, this is a calming thought and serves to reduce anxiety, stress, and threat that makes the pain worse. So what else can we do with this information to help get rid of the pain? The nervous system is involved in everything the body does, including regulating a person's breathing, controlling muscles, and sensing heat and cold. However, nerve damage can lead to several conditions, including the inability to feel pain.
Medical experts say that while this scenario is mostly considered normal, it can also be caused by other factors. Previous conditions Dr. Dean Ahimbibwe, a general practitioner in Kampala, explains that getting injured and not feeling pain is common among people with conditions that weaken nerves.
The girl's parents say that they are in constant anxiety for their daughter. The entire Ashlyn family underwent genetic testing - it turned out that each of her parents was a carrier of a defective allele, and in her genome there were two copies of the damaged SCN9A gene at once, which is responsible for transmitting impulses to neurons that are sensitive to pain. This led to the fact that the girl suffers from congenital insensitivity to pain. It is known that such a condition may be associated with disorders affecting other genes.
When a person is injured, they should feel pain, unless they have diseases that weaken their nerves. For example, people with diabetes have a condition called diabetic neurosis, which paralyzes the nerves and makes it difficult to feel pain. He adds: "People with leprosy may also experience pain long after an injury because the disease causes nerve damage, although this is rare."
When someone is preoccupied with a certain activity and they get hurt, they don't feel immediate pain because their mind is focused on the activity and no attention is paid to the injured part, he says. “This, however, applies to minor injuries unless there is an element of fear associated with the source of the pain,” he adds.
In some cases, doctors manage to cope with this condition and allow such patients to feel pain. Doctors from University College London (University College London) cured a patient in whose body there were no Nav1.7 ion channels involved in the transport of sodium ions. The researchers conducted an experiment on mice with the same disorder. They found that such animals in the body had an increased level of production of opioid peptides, which are natural analgesics.
When someone is shot, he or she definitely feels pain, but the shock and fear associated with a gun sometimes overwhelms the pain, and someone may run away in fear and only feel pain when they have been notified, or have seen the wound a lot later. he explains.
The momentary occurrence of an accident causes a blow to the body and makes it difficult for a person to feel pain until they see the injury. These are very difficult questions to answer because many people, even those who genuinely love insects and spiders, want to humanize them as a way to identify them.
This image is commonly used as an example of maternal help in jumping spiders. Although there is maternity care in this group, it usually does not mean that the mother takes them to a new place in the way shown. Rather than being a pretty picture, this is more of an example of how our desire to identify with insects and spiders can clothe our image of how they behave.
John Wood of University College London and colleagues studied the effects of such drugs in mice lacking Nav 1.7 channels. It turned out that such animals, deprived of the ability to feel pain, had an increased level of expression of opioid peptides, which are natural analgesics.
The authors decided to use drugs that block the work of these peptides. They injected the animals with naloxone, a drug used to treat opioid overdoses. The drug coped with the excess opioid peptides and the animals were able to feel pain.
Insects react to the world differently than we do, and when it comes to cognition, it's very difficult to separate our motives from theirs. The first thing I need to do is define "pain" because it's not as easy as avoiding injury. We can also respond to stimuli without feeling it, using the reflex arc. It is possible to avoid injury without experiencing pain as we understand it.
People who study pain in humans have a pretty useful definition of pain that distinguishes pain from pain and avoidance of injury. An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.
The scientists applied the same approach in the treatment of their patient - a 39-year-old woman was injected with naloxone and she was able to feel pain. For the first time in my life. However, the technique is experimental and is unlikely to be used in clinical practice.
The inability to communicate verbally does not negate the possibility that the person is in pain and needs appropriate pain management. Each person learns the application of the word through the experience of trauma in early age. This definition avoids associating pain with a stimulus. Activity induced by the nociceptive and nociceptive pathways with a noxious stimulus is not pain, which is always a psychological condition, although we can appreciate that pain most often has a close physical cause.
While this may sound a bit casual, we really need to separate pain and nociception. We know that insects can avoid injury and sense most potential sources of damage. It feels pressure and heat and reacts to the chemicals that make peppers hot and mustard spicy. It also occurs in beetles, so painlessness seems to be somewhat common. Different animals use different receptors to perceive different things. Drosophila is repelled by the taste of wasabi, but no crayfish.
What is the modern man most afraid of? Financial crisis, war, Dzhigurda? No, no, no: the "children" of the 21st century are afraid of pain. And the point is not at all a mutation of the human body and a sharp decrease in the pain threshold - the point is psychology: we are so accustomed to comfort that the slightest pain makes us run to the pharmacy and drink handfuls of pills. But it turns out there are other ways to get rid of pain, such as outsmarting your own brain. Here are five ways to do it.
Also, cancers don't respond to the type of burn that dry ice creates when you get a wart burned in a doctor's office. However, they react to heat. Pain is ultimately an emotional response, so whether insects feel pain, as we understand it, really depends on whether they feel emotions. This is where scientists run into problems related to the question of "all insects feel pain."
There is a fairly obvious philosophical problem that needs to be mentioned, The Problem of Other Minds. It is important to note that Drosophila protects itself from parasitic wasps. It does this by flipping them over, which makes it impossible for the wasps to get enough leverage to pierce the larva's exoskeleton.
1. Drink coffee (or other caffeinated beverages)
Every year, in the spring, throwing off winter clothes, we critically look at ourselves in the mirror and reluctantly admit that before the start of the beach season it would be nice to lose a couple of kilograms. A sagging tummy makes you lift your cellulite buttocks off the couch and go to the gym, where we pedal all day, pull dumbbells and die on the treadmill. And at the same time, we feel great until the morning of the next day comes.
Mammals have a varied response to pain, often avoiding use of the affected area and responding to different kinds pain in different ways. Drosophila, on the other hand, reacts to many different insults by leaning towards what hurts. That being said, we can make some additional remarks about how insects learn to avoid bad situations. Drosophila can be conditioned according to Pavlov's famous experiments. The White gene we talked about when we talked about personality seems to regulate how extreme the fly experienced the situation.
The body is not accustomed to such loads: the muscles ache painfully, the back does not straighten, the arms hang like whips. Do not rush to ask your loved ones to shoot you, because all this could have been avoided if you had previously “warmed up” the body with caffeine.
Scientists conducted an experiment: the first group of participants were given tablets with caffeine, and the dosage of one capsule was equal to about two and a half cups of coffee. The second group received an ostensibly pain medication that was actually a placebo. Then the subjects spent the whole day in the gym, actively exercising. As a result, scientists found that the participants in the experiment who took the caffeine pills felt much better the next day than their fellow sufferers, and were even ready to go back to the gym.
Some white mutations, in addition to regulating some aspects of the flies' personality, seem to cause the flies to inflate how bad the experience was. They learn to avoid shock-related stimuli more quickly and not recognize connections more slowly than non-mutated flies. However, this only happens with bad memories. If you reward a fly, white mutants perform pretty similarly to non-mutants.
Interestingly, the human equivalent of whites is involved in panic disorders in humans. There are a million different ways we could go with this on this thread, and there isn't enough room on this blog to go through all the required stuff in detail.
It turns out that advertising does not lie: caffeinated energy drinks can really make us extreme people who can easily overcome any obstacles.
And even if the biggest physical activity you can afford is moving your computer mouse, there is good news for you too. In another study, experimenters asked volunteers to work continuously at a computer for an hour and a half, so that after 90 minutes the subjects' neck, shoulders and wrists were stiff. It’s good that before the start of the experiment, the “experimental” were advised to drink coffee. It turned out that those who followed this recommendation experienced much less pain than those who did not. So do not rush to accuse colleagues who are constantly snooping for coffee in parasitism, perhaps they just have something that hurts?
Can sense when he is injured using mammal-like equipment. can learn to avoid bad things, and looking for good things can differentiate between degrees of "good" and "bad" experiences.
- Have appropriate responses for varying degrees of injury.
- Use mitigating activities such as rubbing, lameness or guarding the injury.
More intense noxious stimuli produce faster, larger strikes and may also cause a beating that consists of large, cyclic, side-to-side movements that are not aimed at any target. Sometimes they are also associated with low amplitude jitter cycles. Striking and intermittent sequences caused by obvious injuries are sometimes accompanied by lascivious behavior.
Think back to your last injury—maybe you sprained your leg or cut your toe. What did you feel at the moment it happened? Most likely, a completely natural human reaction took possession of you: “Damn! How painful! I'm about to bleed and die!" But instead of panic, you can turn on the logic: carefully examine your injuries and assess how serious they are. You have no idea how it will muffle the pain.
There is also some evidence of self-healing in insects, which usually involves the ingestion of substances that adversely affect their development. So they will pay for access to some kind of mitigation when it comes to parasites or disease. One of these insects is Drosophila.
Bottom line: do insects feel pain?
The typical position of entomologists is that insect pain sensations are unlikely. I'm interested in courtship behavior and it doesn't seem to be covered in the literature. So based on all this new information, my answer has moved from outright skepticism to something closer.
The scientists made the following test: armed with a “magic” mirror and an infrared laser, they “burned” the right hands of the subjects, and they looked in the mirror, but saw in it a reflection of the left, not subjected to laser exposure, hand. In other words, they felt pain, but they saw that everything was in order with their limbs, and the pain subsided! A small nuance: you must definitely look at your injuries, the contemplation of someone else's "happiness" does not reduce suffering.
Insects are a very diverse group, with biology that can vary widely between all groups. Among insects, most of the evidence required that insects experience pain in certain groups. However, they do not appear in all groups to the extent that this will lead to a definitive answer. It wouldn't surprise me to know that some insects, especially some of the social insects, would get all the evidence.
Although we cannot say exactly what our current state of knowledge is, it seems that the field of insect nociception may be moving in that direction. At the Institute for Human Genetics in Aachen, Germany, Dr. Ingo Kurt is preparing for a rather unusual assignment. She collects blood samples from Stefan Betz, a 21-year-old university student who suffers from a genetic disorder so rare it's estimated to be only a few hundred people worldwide.
Science is still arguing whether the visual perception of trauma really lowers the pain threshold, but in any case, a sensible assessment of the situation is better than hysteria.
3. Laugh
Imagine: you wake up in the middle of the night when your own bladder wakes you up. You jump out of bed, rush to the toilet with half-closed eyes ... and stumble over the threshold. Pain! Wild unbearable pain! What will you do at such a moment? Of course, after you remember someone's mother and send the door in a certain direction, you will burst into tears or dejectedly go to the toilet. How about a little laugh?
This means that he can put his hand in boiling water or undergo an operation without anesthesia, and still not experience any discomfort. Either way, his sensory perception is normal. He sweats when the room is too hot and shivering from the bite of the cold wind.
We would be interested to know what pain means and what it means to feel pain. Without it, your life is full of challenges. As a young child, Betz's parents initially believed that he was moderately mentally retarded. "We couldn't understand why he was so clumsy," recalls his father, Dominic. "He was constantly bumping into things and getting all the bruises and cuts."
“Laughter is the best medicine,” psychologists say. Of course, laughter is unlikely to help dissolve a cancerous tumor or stop bleeding, but a sense of humor certainly helps to reduce pain. Laughter helps your brain release endorphins, happy hormones that have pain-relieving properties that make you suffer less if you force yourself to laugh at a critical moment.
Scientists conducted a series of tests in which they studied the behavior of volunteers at home and in the laboratory: some of the subjects were asked to watch funny Internet videos, and some were asked to watch boring popular science programs. It turned out that the participants in the experiment, who laughed at funny videos, tolerated pain much easier than those who delved into serious documentaries. Plus, just 15 minutes of laughter is enough to lower your pain threshold by as much as 10%.
