Michael McMahon

Hi, my name is Michael McMahon. I'm inquiring about the function of chronic pain. It can be a very strange illness in that it cannot be observed by someone else or any medical device. But the pain can still be severe for the patients. I was reading about the different theories into its nature. The slight problem I have with the overactive immune response hypothesis or the central sensitisation theory is that pain seems to be an evolved and adaptive response. Could chronic pain be a type of biological stress test? A stress test is where a device is tested to its breaking point to see where it fails and what needs to be done to fix it. Maybe chronic pain could be where the brain deliberately simulates organ failure to see what has to change in order to modify the body part. Science is reductionistic which has obviously been a very successful outlook in many areas. But in some respects the human body is almost infinitely complicated with lots of interdependent systems. This means that in order to change one system the body must make alterations to many others in order to compensate. One brutal but efficient way to do this would be to test the organ to failure so that the body and the genes could check all the different systems to be modified and hence design a blueprint for organ repair or strengthening. This would explain why chronic pain is invisible; because all the physical changes are happening deep in the genes. It would also account for why the pain could be so excruciating. Organs can never rest (if your heart for instance stops beating momentarily you die), so the only way to simulate their failure is to induce extreme long lasting pain to compensate for it. Another point is that it could explain why it happens in seemingly healthy and fit individuals. This is as the pain could be preemptive in nature if the body senses that an organ is not strong enough to withstand anticipated stress and heavy loads or demands. However, I'm not a biologist. It is only a hypothesis.