I find the topic of pain very interesting in that there are several factors that make every pain experience for every person different. It is remarkable that two people who suffer the exact same pain stimulus perceive it in two completely different manners. In that sense, I absolutely think that subjective pain tolerance should be a factor for treatment. For example, two people who both just had knee surgery will receive the same rehabilitation program. The exercises in this program could work perfectly fine for the person who has the average pain tolerance that is kept in mind when designing the program. However, the other person could have an extremely high pain tolerance, and not be able to feel that the exercises he is doing to help his knee get better might be actually hurting him and making his injury worse. Physical therapists should definitely keep this in mind when they are prescribing rehab programs and maybe even conduct a pain tolerance test with each patient to determine his/her level of pain tolerance, so that the appropriate exercises can be assigned.
On the other hand, when we try to imagine our world without our sense of light touch, I think we don’t anticipate how much it would actually affect us. We get caught up in the little things, like the loss of ability to scroll through songs on the touch wheel of an iPod, or feel somebody tapping us on the shoulder. However, losing our sense of light touch would completely rock our world. We wouldn’t have any sense of how much force we were exerting on anything because we wouldn’t realize we were touching it. For example, if I were driving a car, I would have no idea that I were touching my foot to the gas pedal until it was floored…relying solely on my visual system to look at the speedometer and realize how fast I was going would make driving utterly impossible. There are thousands of examples of how the loss of light touch would absolutely ruin somebody’s life, but thankfully most people never have to imagine experiencing any of them.
The phantom limb phenomenon tells us that the brain is a mighty powerful machine. The fact that the brain can override the visual stimulus of not seeing your arm, and continue to tell your body that it is there, is incredible, and while horrifying, makes for a fascinating course of study. The brain is so powerful in this sense that the only way to solve the problem is to trick your mind using the mirror trick, or by getting a prosthetic replacement to satisfy the brain’s desire to still have a lower arm attached to the elbow.
