Reply to comment

I was thinking about some of the questions that Emily brought up in her post during our discussion last week.  I’ve always been interested by the fact that different people experience different levels of pain in response to the same stimulus.  Is this because the intensity of stimulation that is necessary for peripheral activation of neurons is higher in some people than others, or because people’s brains process information from pain transmission neurons in different ways?  Or is it something else all together?  In the pain lab that some of us were in last semester, part of our experiment involved having participants rate when a heating device reached a painfully hot temperature.  I was interested by the fairly wide range of responses.  Although there are of course different psychological factors that could come into play, it seemed like temperatures that some people perceived as highly unpleasant and painful didn’t bother others, which implies (to me) actual neural differences and not some sort of “mental toughness”.  In terms of the question of whether we can change our neural environment when we decide to “tough out” pain, I could definitely believe that if we subject ourselves to the same originally painful stimulus repeatedly the way in which nociceptors or t-cells fire in response to this stimulus will change as well (causing less or more pain, I don’t know).

On a totally different note, I thought the part of our discussion on doctor assisted suicide was very interesting as well.  I’m from Oregon, where physician assisted suicide is legal (I think it’s the only state where this is the case?).  I admittedly don’t know a lot about it, but I was trying to remember after class what I’ve learned in the past about the “Death with Dignity Act”.  I believe that approving a patient under the act requires multiple physicians to confirm that the patient is in high levels of discomfort and has an incurable illness that will cause death in (I think) 6 months.  The patient is also required to undergo a psychological examination, because they have to be shown to be a mental state in which they are capable of making such a serious decision.  For example, we talked in class about how depression could affect a patient’s decision to end their lives, but under this act if a patient were evaluated as depressed they wouldn’t be given approval to go through with it.  I wanted to bring this up because it seems like all the rules and regulations involved in the act address a lot of the issues and concerns that people had in class with doctor assisted suicide, but on the other hand I know that there is a lot of controversy around it because the regulations make it difficult and time-consuming for patients to get approval, and to some degree this seems to almost defeat the purpose.  I’d be curious to know what other people think.