Friday, November 11, 2011

How much pain can a human withstand?

You might be surprised to find that people can withstand quite a lot of pain! Of course, if the trauma or cause of pain is severe enough, the damage can result in death or coma. The body has ways of handling severe pain, though. When the body undergoes severe (especially sudden) pain, one of our survival mechanisms is a drop in heart rate and blood pressure. This decrease in blood flow to the brain can cause a person to pass out. People who have sudden injury, as in a car accident, often pass out as a result of the pain.


Similarly, the body can go into a sort of hormonal overdrive to help protect the nervous system from severe pain. For example, most women experience extreme pain during childbirth. During labor, oxytocin is released in the mother's body, having the effect of dulling pain and creating a sense of calm. In this way, the body compensates for the trauma of the infant passing through the birth canal. (The oxytocin is also passed onto baby through mother's blood and milk, but that's another matter!)


Pain is relative, and everyone is different in terms of how much they can stand. Some people have a naturally high pain tolerance, some develop a high pain tolerance, and some people experience low pain tolerance for their whole lives. It is very difficult to measure pain objectively, and therefore difficult to give you a concrete answer to this question. We can certainly measure factors like impact, tissue damage, and blood loss, but even these can have very different effects on any two people.

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