Thirsty People Feel More Pain

Bifurcati writes "Being thirsty makes you more sensitive to pain, according to a recent study. By simultaneously doing brain scans, new areas of the brain were activated when both pain and thirst were present, apparently making the pain more "painful" - perhaps a survival method so that pain is prioritized over thirst. They'd like to do more research, but ethical issues make it tough - even these subjects had to spend three hours being poked and prodded!"

Comments

Re:Dehydration and pain - link known for nearly 30

[Copid]

I particularly like Dr. B's statement:

I hold the idea that the AIDS is not a viral disease, but is a metabolic disorder precipitated by an exaggerated way of life.

Although, I must admit that, "'Bad' Cholesterol: A Myth and a Fraud" was nearly as interesting.

While it's interesting when somebody smart posits a contrarian view or two, the people who seem to think that essentially everything about prevailing theory is wrong are usually... well... nuts. I couldn't help but notice that very few of his papers had anything in them that indicated that they were actually published by a journal other than his own. Coincidence?

Re:Pain coming from fear?

[fafalone]

Considering I've met people with various levels of HSAN, I'm sure your sensitivity to pain is actually quite high. Sensitivity and tolerance for pain are also different concepts. Unless you have late developing CIPA or a similar HSAN disease, I suspect your sensitivity is normal. However, extensive research has been conducted and shown that perception of pain can be controlled by the higher parts of the brain, and thus can be selectively or conditioned to be ignored to various degrees of success. Now this is also different from pain from massive trauma, which is probably an evolutionary mechanism to let you get out of situations that are severely harming you before you have to deal with the pain.
It's not mind over matter, it's just how the mind works. Guess what controls parts of higher order affective pain response? Some abstract construct people call the "mind"? No, hows about parts of the insular cortex.

Also that statement is pretty provably false

[Sycraft-fu]

AIDS develops in people infected with the HIV virus and not elsewhere, it happens in 100% of cases, given a long enough time, and it happens in all regious of the world, to peopel of all different lifestyles. Thus it's orety well proven that indeed the HIV virus is the cause of AIDS.

Now of course it's always possible that this is wrong, but you'd need some pretty major proof to make that case. My guess is you are right, the guy is a crackpot. Doesn't mean that he doesn't perhaps have a good idea or two, but I'd be wary of what he says in general.