Читать книгу Why It Hurts - Dr. Aneesh Singla - Страница 7

Think of pain as a speech your body is delivering about a subject of vital importance to you.

—Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt & What We Can Do About It

One Sunday afternoon while cleaning out my garage, I noticed some bottles of beer that needed to be moved to the refrigerator. I picked them up and, as I turned to open the fridge door, one slipped out of the carton and smashed on the concrete floor behind me. The pressurized liquid sounded like an explosion. Shards of glass lay scattered across the garage floor. When I knelt down to sweep them up, I noticed a twinge in my left leg. Upon examining my calf, I discovered a two-inch-long gash, but I hadn’t felt anything at the time of the injury. The explosive sound had startled me so much, it had completely distracted me from the experience of the injury.

Physical pain is a universal experience. (There are certain people who do not feel pain, as we will discuss in Chapter 2, but they are extraordinarily rare exceptions.) While the sensation is unpleasant—at best—it serves a vital function by teaching us how to adapt to our surroundings.

For example, when we are young, we learn that we experience pain when we touch something sharp. Thus, we learn to avoid sharp objects to avoid further damaging our bodies. Pain, in short, is an adaptive and protective sensation.