The agony of feeling no pain

I had read this story a couple years back and the way Steven Pete remembers Child Protective Services is a bit different from how his mum remembers it:

    > Once, CPS told the Petes they wanted to remove Steven, then a toddler,
    > for two months of observation at a Seattle hospital.
    >
    > "I said to them, 'OK, but will somebody be watching him 24 hours a
    > day?' They said, 'Oh yes.' "
    >
    > In the hospital, "He broke his foot, and they didn't discover it until
    > a day and half later. They had no idea when or how it happened. Child
    > Services said they realized what we were going through. They worked
    > with us on it. They were really nice."

There's other stuff -- another sufferer and a lot more details -- in the article I'd read: http://tdn.com/lifestyles/article_e230b156-b22e-11df-93d9-00...

Anyway, this community, I think, cares a lot about pushing yourself to succeed, but knows the price of burnout that can be associated with that. These people just have this physically: rather than some sort of abstract 'laziness' we normally have 'pain' which slows us down, and while pushing past a little pain is usually good -- it gets you running and developing muscle -- there is serious pain which tells you 'something is wrong, you're about to injure yourself' which you fortunately can't easily push past. Well, these guys can, and it leads to real injury. There's a deep connection here somewhere between the mental fatigue and physical fatigues.

There is a concentration of people with "Norrbottnian congenital insensitivity to pain" in Norrbotten in northern Sweden: http://www.slideshare.net/gejanmin/20090801-hsan-presentatio...

>"If you're not in pain then you have no reason to be on any type of assistance."

So that's the qualifier for having a debilitating disability? Not medical bills, not the cost of equipment and care, but pain? Hell, I'm in pain all the time. Where's my check?

You'd think the qualifier for disability assistance would be having a disability that costs you money and keeps you from earning money. Pain is not automatically a disability, and lack of pain is not automatically the lack of a disability.

Sad that the article didn't ask/answer one essential, obvious question: what about emotional pain?

From the article, I would guess that he feels it. But many studies have shown that emotional pain (e.g. the pain of losing a loved one) produces physiological reactions similar to physical pain. Does he feel emotional pain? Did he feel that ache and sinking feeling in the chest when his brother took his life? How did he feel it? How would he describe it?

His concern about appendicitis is rather interesting. I wonder if preemptively removing it is something that has been considered. They do that with a keyhole operation these days if I recall correctly, so accidental injury during recovery would probably be fairly minimal.

Curiously enough, there's still other conditions relating to pain. My own favorite obscure disorder is 'pain asymbolia': where you feel pain and know something bad is happening, but it's not painful. As far as I've been able to find out, it's not like this (or other nerve deadening problems like diabetes or leprosy) in apparently causing no serious injuries or self-injuries.

Relevant: http://lesswrong.com/lw/51f/guilt_another_gift_nobody_wants/

As a pain sensitive human, I think the closest approximation I can come up with of this condition is being very very drunk. If I recall correctly, one of the most common cause of death by hypothermia is alcohol. It's also much easier to get injured badly when you are drunk due to decreased pain sensitivity (complemented by decreased judgement). And even then, I guess this does not even come close to what this man must have been living with.

It's hard for me to understand how a person could have a sense of touch but not feel pain. It seems like touch is just a continuum where pain is where it crosses over into being unpleasant. I've always been similarly confused about how painkillers work. Pain must somehow be an actually different thing than regular touch, but I don't get how this can be.

That was an interesting read, but I don't really see what it has to do with technology or business.