It sounds like a superpower you might find in a comic book, but people who can’t feel pain suffer more than you think. It’s a condition called Congenital Insensitivity To Pain, (CIP) and in this video, I take a look at some examples of people who have this condition, and how they might help save thousands of lives.
TRANSCRIPT:
I have a bit of a personal interest in the subject of pain. Long time viewers might know I have a bit of a quasi-chronic pain issue myself.
Long story short, I get chronic mouth ulcers. And any of you out there that has ever had these things know, they suck. Not being able to eat sucks.
Now before the comments start flooding in, I’m not talking about cold sores or fever blisters, that’s herpes, that’s not what this is.
No, what I have is genetic, it’s a hundred times more painful and way more gross.
The sciency name for it is an aphthous stomatitis, so the “condition” I have is called RAS, Recurrent Aphthous Stomatitis.
It’s basically your immune system overproducing a type of protein called a cytokine. This particular cytokine’s job is to go to any site of trauma, and pop any cells nearby that could possibly be damaged; because that damaged cell might have damaged DNA, and if it multiplies, now you’ve got two cells with damaged DNA. Then four, then eight… You can see where this is going.
That’s when it works the way its supposed to, but in my body, it overproduces this protein, so instead of just popping the nearby cells, it just kinda keeps popping and popping and popping until it makes a nice little crater in your soft tissue. With an exposed nerve or two.
And growing up, I had those pretty much all the time.
One way that my wife and I are different is she’s a big foodie and I’m not. She really gets into food, like on an emotional level, and has strong opinions about it. I don’t. I like good food of course, but to me food is food. Eating is just a thing I have to do.
And sometimes it would really bother her that I don’t get into food as much as she does but then one time we were talking about it and it kinda hit me that for the majority of my upbringing… eating was a painful experience.
I would literally dread having dinner sometimes when I was a kid. When biting into a tomato feels like someone’s stabbing you in the face with a red-hot poker… you skip some meals.
One time I went to tennis camp and I had an ulcer on the side of my tongue the size of a dime. I could barely even move it And I spent the whole camp talking like this. It really built my character.
It’s not nearly as bad these days, in part because I think it was especially bad when I was a teenager because hormones and stuff but also because – full disclosure – I developed a vitamin formula that helped regulate that cytokine production. I do sell this under the name Cankerboy – it’s a small side business of mine.
I know, shameless plug but also if you can relate to anything I’m saying here… it might help. Go check it out.
But the real point of me saying all that is I became kinda fascinated with pain and how it works. Like how could a tiny 2mm spot in my mouth hurt SO BAD?
Like have you ever had an infected tooth? Where you can feel your pulse in your tooth… and your entire head just throbbing with each one?
Like, how. How does it hurt so bad!?
That happened to me about a year ago and I swear to God, I could have shoved a pencil into my forearm skin and it wouldn’t have hurt as much.
Nerves are weird.
There were many times in my life when I would have given anything to be able to just turn off the pain signal in my body.
But alas, no CIP for me. But trust me, that’s a good thing.
But I think I made my point, just because someone can’t feel pain doesn’t mean they’re not suffering. This is not a superpower, our bodies evolved to feel pain for a reason.
So what went wrong here?
So that’s how CIP works… or doesn’t work, I’m confused now.
The question is what can we learn from that to help treat CIP patients?
So next time you stub your toe or cut your finger, thank your lucky neuron pathways that you felt it. After all, life is pain. Without it, you’re dead.
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