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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

(A little off-topic but) if you are in such chronic pain all of the time, wouldn't that be similar to the case of not feeling pain at all? Would it be possible to hurt yourself and not even know it, or would the pain still increase beyond a certain threshold when you actually hurt yourself?

E.g. Maybe if you broke your leg, you would notice, but what about a sprain/strain? Would it be possible to not even know, and further injure yourself because your didn't modify your behaviour?

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My case is a little different from general chronic pain where the exact cause cannot be diagnosed, when I was a child I was run-over by a truck, I survived but had back and neck injuries. Over the years the pain became worse but even at it's worse I personally can still feel other pain, even on medicine (I am treated with opiates) I am able to feel pain, the medicine just makes the mind able to ignore it and not allow it to drive a person mad. Before I was treated for it, I remember when I would get injuries that hurt worse than my back/chest/neck it actually would kind of be a relief because it was different, it was not the same pain that grinds you down day in and day out. Non the less, I still felt it and it still hurt, but it was a physical pain where chronic and contentious pain turns into a mental anguish. The best thing I ever did was seek the help of pain management, for better or worse, the war on drugs has stigmatized some of the most effective medicines for pain treatment, I was a victim of the propaganda for years and believed that I would end up a mindless junky if I took the medicine. I was under the impression it was where people in pain go to die a death as a junky. Funny part was, it was the day I got my life back.

I am speaking from a different perspective, I have gout and have had it worsen over the past couple of months while losing massive amounts of weight.

I now have pain in my feet that takes a couple of days to a week to go away with meds. I bite through the pain, but I can also feel when I hurt some other part of my body while working out. The pain is different, has a different intensity and just in general is nothing like the pain from the gout.

One thing it does do is numb pain in general, even with different pain in different parts of my body I have a higher pain tolerance in general, and I feel the pain differently.

I know what you mean about the pain feeling different. It's really hard to describe, I imagine it's different for everyone. How are you approaching working out?

I'm just going for it. I figure the sooner I lose the weight, the sooner the gout will go away too.

apparently not. according to kahnemann (thinking fast and slow) pain and loud noises are the two things we can't adjust to. i don't know what reference he gives (just remember reading it), but since he's pretty reliable elsewhere i assume he's correct (you can imagine evolutionary reasons why it doesn't make sense to acclimatize to these, i guess). also, the "loud noise" is consistent with the american torture techniques you see reported in the news.

as for the article title. it's not really true, is it? i have mild chronic pain (i have ms, which means nerve damage, somewhat similar to the article). you can learn to live with it. and you can cope. but i'm certainly not happier than i would be without it...

Part of the mis-wiring (for me anyways) is that the sympathetic system is jacked up -- I often don't have an appropriate response to impending or near-recent injury. You do still feel it, just different than I remember (although my memory of normal is pretty faded) One thing that is notable is that other (normally non-painful stimuli such as a glancing touch or intermittent contact - like a shower) are astonishingly painful.

For me, The pain isn't necessarily painful. It's closer to a dull ache that's always there.

There are times where it gets worse, and it's like somebody's kicked you, and times when its really bad like when somebody's stabbed you.

But generally, I feel the pain, and then any extra pain on top. And it's not like an actual injury where it hurts more when you move, its just there, like background noise of your nervous system.

Chronic pain is usually (to put things simply) when the pain matrix is sending false positives constantly. True positives will still register. The experience will be slightly different than people without chronic pain, but for the most part chronic pain patients are aware of injury.

The problem with your definition of false positives vs. true positives, is that one would think that if false positives are happening all of the time, eventually the person might ignore true positives. The other explanations of the pains having different feelings makes more sense in clearing this up.

I came here to ask this too. What if you burn yourself? I imagine that is very difficult to deal with.

At one point, I was standing there, holding the pot that was burning my hand, wondering what the 'ham' smell was before realizing that I needed to drop the pot... then wondering how to let go. Very surreal.

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