“Pain is the watchdog of health,” said the sages of Ancient Greece. And indeed it is. In the process of evolution of the animal world, pain turned into a signal of danger, became an important biological factor for the preservation of life.
AND PAIN IS SUBJECT TO MAN
Pain is an inevitable companion of a person from the day of his birth until his death. Pain is perceived by special pain receptors scattered throughout the body; only 1 sq. cm of human skin there are about one hundred such receptors.
Pain sensitivity varies from person to person. In some people it is increased, in others it is lowered, there are extremely rare cases when a person is generally insensitive to pain - analgesia. The phenomenon of analgesia is observed in people with certain diseases of the nervous system. In our time, about 40 people in the world are known to suffer from this disease.
In 1999, the press reported that the married couple Angela and Simon Gad from Oklahoma have three children at once with this rare genetic disorder - 8-year-old Juddie, 6-year-old Jonathan and 2-year-old Sam. These children do not know what pain is, their lives are constantly under threat, since they cannot determine the boundaries of mortal danger.
During the gloomy Middle Ages, such people were expected to die inevitably at the stake, since then it was believed that the absence of pain in a person was marked by a "devil's seal."
Experiencing pain is a subjective process. Its character depends on the personality, on the mental characteristics of the patient. The French writer Alphonse Daudet figuratively said about this: "Every patient makes himself pain, and the sensations change, like a singer's voice, depending on the acoustics of the hall."
Promotional video:
It has been experimentally proven that the perception of pain is greatly influenced by the cerebral cortex, that pain can be brought under the control of a person's consciousness. There are many examples when a person suppressed pain with his willpower.
From time immemorial, the legend of the courageous Roman youth Scsevola Gai Muzia (scsevola - literally translated from Latin "left-handed") has come down to our days. In those distant times, the Romans fought against the Etruscans, who besieged Rome (late 6th - early 5th centuries BC). Scovola made his way into the Etruscan camp in order to kill the king Porsena, but his plan fell through: instead of the king, he killed the royal scribe, who was sitting in the king's place and gave the soldiers a monetary salary. Scovola was captured and brought before the Etruscan king. Suspecting that the Roman had not entered the camp alone, had accomplices, Porsen wanted to intimidate Scovola with the forthcoming cruel tortures and thus get the necessary information from the prisoner. Muzio rejected betrayal with contempt and, wishing to show his enemy that he was not afraid of pain and death,in front of the Etruscan warriors, he himself lowered his right hand into the fire of the fire and did not make a single sound while his hand was burning. Struck by what he saw, Porsen ordered to release the young man, and at the same time lifted the siege of Rome.
In the 1920s, the Austrian artist To-Rama performed on circus arenas in many countries - he demonstrated complete insensitivity to pain. In 1928, To-Rama performed with his original numbers in front of Muscovites.
To-Rama participated in the First World War as cannon fodder; at the end of the war he was seriously wounded by a grenade fragment. In the hospital he was in constant pain; doctors recognized the condition of the wounded as hopeless. “Then something revolted in me … I gritted my teeth, and I had only one thought:“You must stay alive, you will not die, you will not feel any pain”. I repeated this to myself an infinite number of times, until this thought entered my flesh and blood so much that I finally ceased to feel pain.
I don't know how it happened, but something incredible happened. The doctors shook their heads. My condition began to improve from day to day. So I survived only with the help of will. Two months later, in one of the Viennese hospitals, I underwent an operation without anesthesia and even without local anesthesia, one self-hypnosis was enough. And when I fully recovered, I developed my own system of defeating myself and went so far in this respect that in general I do not experience suffering if I don’t want to experience it,”To-Rama wrote later.
In 1927, To-Rama underwent a thorough examination at the Medical Society in Berlin, the doctors found that To-Rama was completely healthy. The doctors also found that the artist does not suppress pain, as most medical luminaries thought, but simply turns it off.
In 1985, the artist "Soyuzgoscirk" Mikhail Pliska on tour in Karaganda broke his arm during a rehearsal. They took the arm in a cast, the bones of the arm grew together, but, as it turned out already in Tashkent, where the artist consulted the Research Institute of Traumatology, the bones did not grow together correctly, and an operation was needed. The patient asked U. Islambekov, a doctor of medicine, who was supposed to operate on Pliska, to have the operation performed without anesthesia, which surprised the surgeons a lot. It took an unusual patient a lot of work to convince venerable doctors that he could easily undergo the operation without anesthesia. As the doctors later testified, they did not perform the operation on the operating table, as expected, but, at the request of the patient, sitting next to him. Putting his hand on the table, the operated was absolutely calm and even joked that he was tickled.
Why didn't the patient need anesthesia? As Pliska himself explained, from his school years he was fond of reading medical literature, doing auto-training and self-hypnosis in order to control himself and control himself. As evidenced by the operation - Pliska succeeded.
This happened in early 2000 in the Moldovan city of Soroca. The surgeon performed a simple operation to remove appendicitis on pensioner Ion Celak and felt that the patient did not have enough anesthesia, and there was nowhere else to take it; the surgeon invited the operated person to sing a duet. The operation lasted 40 minutes, and during this time the doctor and the patient duet performed the entire repertoire they knew. After the operation, the patient admitted that he did not feel any pain.
This amazing incident also happened in 2000 with a 43-year-old Ukrainian worker at a construction site. Misfortune happened to him when he was installing electrical wiring: a heavy electrical panel, under a voltage of 380 volts, fell and crushed the worker's hand. In this case, two wires stuck into the hand; a voltaic arc formed inside the victim's tissues, and for more than five minutes the poor fellow burned with an electric current. I could not turn off the voltage, there were no comrades nearby; the worker made the decision to break his crushed arm. The worker did this: calculatedly and coolly with two hammer blows he broke his arm, thereby extinguishing the voltaic arc. The worker was found and taken to the Sklifosovsky Institute with a severe burn on his forearm. Usually in such cases, a limb is amputated, however, microsurgeons performed a miracle and restored the mutilated hand, and covered the burned area with skin,taken from the back of the patient. After a few years, the patient's hand began to work.
Later, the victim said that he made the decision to break his arm when, at the most critical moment, he suddenly remembered that wolves, having fallen into a trap, were gnawing at their paws.
The natives of Phuket Island (near Thailand) believe that if they accept more pain in this world, then they will be better in the afterlife. Therefore, they deliberately seek out constant sources of pain for themselves: they pierce their bodies with thorns, wrap themselves with barbed wire. From time to time, the natives arrange competitions among themselves: who will disfigure themselves in the most barbaric way.
And this is another example of voluntarily condemning oneself to pain and torment. In the small Filipino town of San Fernando, the Christian holiday of Good Friday is celebrated annually. On this day, several fanatic believers accept all the torments that Jesus Christ received on the day of his execution, including the crucifixion.
Filipinos are preparing for such a massive spectacle-performance with great care, trying to repeat exactly the descriptions of the death of the founder of Christianity according to the Bible: a small hill that replaces Calvary is surrounded by volunteers dressed in the armor of Roman centurions. The heroes of the day are several fanatics who have been preparing for the role of Christ for a long time. The action itself takes place as according to the Bible: first they are scourged with whips, then each of them, bending over, carries a heavy oak cross to the hill - "Golgotha", where they are crucified, being nailed to the cross with real nails. True, on the cross they are not allowed to suffer for a long time (only a few minutes), they are removed from the cross and provided with medical assistance. Otherwise, these volunteer martyrs would have died of heart failure (previously it was believed that those crucified on the cross were dying of thirst). However, despite their fanaticism, these martyrs understandthat, unlike the biblical Christ, if they die, they will not be resurrected.
It should be noted that every year there are several people for the role of Christ. Among these fanatics there are even champions: 29-year-old Rico David crucified on the cross 5 times, 30-year-old Rolando Ocampo - 7 times, and 33-year-old M. Castro - 11 times.
In 2003, 39-year-old English artist Sebastian Horsley traveled thousands of miles in the Philippines, paying the natives 3.5 thousand dollars to be nailed to a cross. Sebastian wanted to experience at least part of the suffering of Christ. Returning to his homeland, the artist, on fresh impressions, took up his brushes to paint a series of paintings about the crucifixion of early Christians on crosses.
OVERPRESSING PAIN
One of the earliest painkillers was nitrous oxide, or "laughing gas," a gas with a pleasant smell. In 1798, twenty-year-old Humphrey Davy, experimenting with various gaseous substances, discovered that this gas caused him to involuntary uncontrollable laughter, gestures and soothed his toothache. X. Davy reported his discovery only in 1800, but did not connect it with the possibility of using it in medicine.
In 1844, the dentist Horace Wells from the North American town of Hartford, breathing "laughing gas", removed an aching tooth from himself without feeling pain. Later, some dentists used nitrous oxide to extract teeth, and surgeons in England and France used it as anesthesia in some complex surgical operations. However, the importance of "laughing gas" in medicine fell immediately after the ether was discovered.
The narcotic effect of ether was discovered quite by accident. Surgeon Jackson accidentally broke a container of chlorine and received a dose of this poisonous gas. The doctor decided to neutralize the effect of chlorine on the respiratory organs with a mixture of ammonia and ethyl ether, mentally calculating that the hydrogen of the ether would combine with chlorine and form hydrogen chloride, which would immediately combine with ammonia. Although the doctor's calculation was wrong, the result was obvious - the sore throat disappeared as soon as he inhaled this mixture.
After Jackson's discovery, ether was used as a pain reliever. In 1867, a monument to the ether was erected in Boston.