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jelizondo [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Guardian has a long and very interesting article [theguardian.com] about pain and its psychology and physiology. Some gripping anecdotes like the soldier who picks his torn arm from the ground and walks to receive medical attention or the woman who worked and walked around for 10 hours with a burst cyst and a “a belly full of blood.”

Why some people can withstand high pain while others cry over a little knock in their knee?

Some say it was John Sattler’s own fault. The lead-up to the 1970 rugby league grand final had been tense; the team he led, the South Sydney Rabbitohs [rabbitohs.com.au], had lost the 1969 final. Here was an opportunity for redemption. The Rabbitohs were not about to let glory slip through their fingers again.

Soon after the starting whistle, Sattler went in for a tackle. As he untangled – in a move not uncommon in the sport at the time – he gave the Manly Sea Eagles’ John Bucknall a clip on the ear.

Seconds later – just three minutes into the game – the towering second rower returned favour with force: Bucknall’s mighty right arm bore down on Sattler, breaking his jaw in three places and tearing his skin; he would later need eight stitches. When his teammate Bob McCarthy turned to check on him, he saw his captain spurting blood, his jaw hanging low. Forty years later Sattler would recall that moment [dailytelegraph.com.au]. One thought raged in his shattered head: “I have never felt pain like this in my life.”

But he played on. Tackling heaving muscular players as they advanced. Being tackled in turn, around the head, as he pushed forward. All the while he could feel his jaw in pieces.

At half-time the Rabbitohs were leading. In the locker room, Sattler warned his teammates, “Don’t play me out of this grand final.”

McCarthy told him, “Mate, you’ve got to go off.”

He refused. “I’m staying.”

Sattler played the whole game. The remaining 77 minutes. At the end, he gave a speech and ran a lap of honour. The Rabbitohs had won. The back page of the next day’s Sunday Mirror screamed “BROKEN JAW HERO”.

[...]

How can a person bitten by a shark calmly paddle their surfboard to safety, then later liken the sensation of the predator clamping down on their limb to the feeling of someone giving their arm “a shake” [theguardian.com]? How is it that a woman can have a cyst on her ovary burst, her abdomen steadily fill with blood, but continue working at her desk for six hours? Or that a soldier can have his legs blown off then direct his own emergency treatment? [youtube.com] [16:06 and quite moving.]

Each one of us feels pain. We all stub our toes, burn our fingers, knock our knees. And worse. The problem with living in just one mind and body is that we can never know whether our six out of 10 on the pain scale is the same as the patient in the chair next to us.

[...]

But what is happening in the body and mind of a person who does not seem to feel the pain they “should” be feeling. Do we all have the capacity to be one of these heroic freaks?

And how did John Sattler play those 77 minutes?

Questions like these rattled around the mind of Lorimer Moseley when he showed up at Sydney’s Royal North Shore hospital years ago as an undergraduate physiotherapy student. He wanted to interrogate a quip made by a neurology professor as he left the lecture theatre one day, that the worst injuries are often the least painful. So Moseley sat in the emergency room and watched people come in, recording their injuries and asking them how much they hurt.

“And this guy came in with a hammer stuck in his neck – the curly bit had got in the back and was coming out the front and blood was pouring all down,” Moseley recalls. “But he was relaxed. He just walked in holding the hammer, relaxed. Totally fine.”

Then the man turned around, hit his knee on a low table and began jumping up and down at the pain of the small knock.

“And I think, ‘Whoa, what is happening there?’”

The curious student ruled out drugs, alcohol, shock. He realised that the reason the man did not feel pain from his hammer injury was due to the very point of pain itself.

“Pain is a feeling that motivates us to protect ourselves,” says Moseley, now the chair in physiotherapy and a professor of clinical neurosciences at the University of South Australia.

“One of the beautiful things about pain is that it will motivate us to protect the body part that’s in danger, really anatomically specific – it can narrow it right down to a tiny little spot.”

[...]

Prof Michael Nicholas is used to stories like these. “You can see it in probably every hospital ward. If you stay around long enough you’ll hear comments like ‘this person has more pain than they should have’ or ‘you might be surprised that they’re not in pain’,” he says. “What that highlights to me is the general tendency for all of us to think there should be a close relationship between a stimulus like an injury or a noxious event and the degree of pain the person feels.

“In fact, that’s generally wrong. But it doesn’t stop us believing it.”

The reason we get it wrong, Nicholas says, “is that we have a sort of mind-body problem”.

Eastern medicine and philosophy has long recognised the interconnectedness of body and mind, and so too did the west in early civilisations. In ancient Greece the Algea, the gods of physical pain, were also gods associated with psychic pain – with grief and distress. But in the 1600s the French philosopher René Descartes set western thinking on a different course, asserting that the mind and body were separate entities.

“When people come to see me, they’re often worried they’re being told it’s all in their head,” Nicholas says.

“Of course pain is in your head. It’s in your brain. You know, it’s the brain that is where you get that experience … It’s never all physical.”

This is true of people who tolerate acute pain. It’s never all physical. And it has little to do with heroism or freakishness.

[...]

And so the experience of acute pain is caught in the realm of mystery and mythology; where we can understand much of what is happening in a body and part of what is happening in a brain but never actually know what another person feels.

The legend of John Sattler goes that after that fateful right hook from Bucknall, the bloodied captain turned to his teammate Matthew Cleary. That no one knew, perhaps not even himself, the damage that had been done to him became his mythological power.

“Hold me up,” he said. “So they don’t know I’m hurt.”

Original Submission