YOU would imagine that pain would be straightforward enough to work out; if you bang your elbow, it's normal to assume that the pain travels from your joint to the brain and out your mouth with an ouch. But in fact it can be quite a confusing to work out. The elbow bang is pain in its most straightforward guise.
There are many times in dentistry that you would think that a person should be feeling pain but they don’t. I have removed eggcup-sized infections from people's jaw bones who have had no idea that they had a huge pus ball entrapped in their body. On the other end of the spectrum, people can experience pain in their teeth, jaw or facial muscles when the dentist can’t see anything out of the ordinary in their mouth or on any X-rays.
So what’s going on? It’s due to all pain being controlled by the brain.
Psychologist HK Beecher studied 215 seriously wounded soldiers in the Battle of Anzio and noticed that only 27 per cent requested pain relief. When the soldiers were asked if they were in pain, 60 per cent said that they had little or no pain, which was extraordinary as many had received penetrating abdominal wounds. The psychologists concluded that the men were blocking their pain with emotional factors. Their physical injuries were less threatening to them than the battlefield and even meant an escape from war.
Emotional pain lights up the same neurones in the brain as physical pain. If your brain has been stimulated with either physical or emotional pain in the past sometimes it doesn’t switch off properly and then additional neurones start firing. A bit like if one strand of Christmas tree lights won’t turn off and then all the others actually turn on in sympathy, the whole tree ends up lit up. If a brain is continually lit up, a person feels pain in their body, that can move around and spread to more and more parts.
The good news is that you can turn off the misfiring brain neurones and strengthen your brain using different psychological and physical methods which can reduce or negate the need to take painkillers.
