How much pain can the human body actually handle?
And can pain become so intense that it causes death?
Can pain actually kill?
Let's find out.
First we need to understand how pain actually works.
There are four basic steps to feeling pain.
The first is contact with the stimulus.
This is the thing which actually causes the pain.
For example, a knife cutting through your finger or fire burning your skin.
Secondly is the reception of the pain by your nerve endings.
Nerves cover every inch of your body.
As soon as a nerve ending detects tissue damage or potential tissue damage, it alerts your
brain by sending a pain signal, so you can hopefully stop whatever it is that is causing
that tissue damage.
This takes us on to the third step, transmission.
The nerve sends a signal to the central nervous system in your brain.
Which is made up of neurons.
The fourth and final step is processing.
Your central nervous system has been informed of the pain signal.
The neurons in your brain now communicate with each other to determine if the threat
is great enough to warrant a pain response, and if so, your brain calculates how much
pain is required.
Your brain then acts on the decision, and you feel pain.
But is there a cap to how much pain we can feel?
Well yes, since our brain decides when and how much pain we can feel, it can also shut
it off.
Usually it does this by shutting itself down completely when the central nervous system
becomes overloaded.
Subjects of torture often report passing out when the level of pain becomes to great to
handle.
Before modern medicine and the invention of anaesthetic, it was extremely commonplace
and considered quite normal for patients to pass out whilst undergoing an amputation.
But the level of pain required to pass out can't be measured as an exact figure, because
pain is subjective, and everyone feels pain differently.
In the 1940s James D. Hardy tried to introduce a standardised measurement of pain levels,
called the Dolorimeter.
But the idea never caught on because everyone experiences pain in a unique way, so the measurements
were highly inconsistent.
But can pain kill you?
Well turns out it can, although somewhat indirectly.
You can't die from receiving too many pain signals, because your brain will shut down
and you will pass out before it does any serious damage to your brain cells.
You can however die from shock.
No I'm not talking about emotional shock.
There is a separate medical condition caused circulatory shock, which is caused by an acute,
intense level of pain.
When your body goes into shock insufficient blood and oxygen reaches your cells, resulting
in rapid and permanent tissue damage.
If shock is not treated quickly it can cause fatal damage to your organs and your brain.
And in some cases this can result in a rather quick death.
In fact during wars, medics found that administering pain killers such as morphine to a wounded
soldier and therefore preventing them from going into shock could often save their life.
They found that the quicker the morphine was administered, the higher the survival rate
of wounded soldiers.
Shock and pain was such a lethality, that during World War II, soldiers carried morphine
with them on the battlefield.
As it could often save their lives by massively reducing pain levels after sustaining a serious
injury.
So yes pain can kill you.