In the 1600s, Descartes famously drew a boy on one knee, his foot being burned by a fire. On the boy, he drew a line from the foot, up the leg, along the spine, and into the brain. This line was supposed to represent the nerve, or pain, pathway in humans. Descartes’ drawing set the standard for conventional medicine’s understanding of pain pathways for hundreds of years.
Why Pain is Complex:
We now know that pain is much more complex than Descartes understood, and that different factors along the pain pathway increase pain, while others reduce it. Stress hormones and sex hormones play a role in pain, as does the chemistry of the body, including acidity, vitamin and mineral availability, and the presence of harmful substances such as heavy metals and pollutants. We now also know that the brain is capable of making executive decisions to ignore pain. This explains how a football player, for example, could complete a play having just broken an ankle.
Although medicine continues to study pain extensively, the different factors involved, and how they interact, make it very difficult to draw a full picture of how we feel pain.
