Let’s say there’s no blood loss or anything like that. Could a person die this way?
I’d imagine if the pain is severe enough you’d go into shock.Maybe one of the board Docs can confirm,but I think I remember reading of people dying when going into shock.
Maybe that’s toxic shock.
IANAD but:
“Shock” is, in simple terms, a profound drop in blood pressure (which can be due to many things, of which I believe pain is one), which results in a lack of circulation to the brain and other vital organs, which causes death.
I have never seen a cite for this, but I always thought that comas are the body’s way of dealing with extreme pain.
I’ve heard possible ULs about this - my WAG would be that maybe the pain and fear is too much of a strain for the heart, and causes a heart attack.
In one of Ian Fleming’s* James Bond* novels, Bond kicked a bad guy in the nuts and killed him. Sounds plausiable.
I would think that in the Bond novel, the guy probably died from resulting blood loss and shock.
:smack:
plausible
You should be smacking yourself somewhere else after that example.
You need a doc in here to answers these questions, but from what I’ve been told, it’s really all in your head. That isn’t said to minimize things, just the way it is.
I’ve talked a few times to a doctor whose specialty is pain management, and he told he that there were cases of people in horrible shape (shot up, limbs broken, etc) who didn’t feel any pain for days. I had a similar, although less drastic reaction to pain when I broke my ankle (in 3 places…). I knew it was broken (heard it snap, couldn’t walk), I knew it was supposed to hurt, but it just kind of bothered me. I was taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital, xrayed, admitted, and all the while it just bothered me. Nurses would pop their head into my room every half hour and ask me if I wanted a shot of something. Finally, 5 hours later, I started to feel pain.
I can’t imagine how it would be possible to die from pain itself as opposed to whatever is the root cause of the pain. If I’m hurting that badly, there’s most definitely something wrong that’s causing the pain, and that’s what I would expect to die from.
SC
I’ve read about torture, and don’t remember anything about anyone dying from the pain. They pass out is all. (All?)
Peace,
mangeorge
Stana: what about if the pain is caused by playing with the nervous system?
Pinching and slicing through nerves or something like that. I’m sure some torture specialists could bring atrocious pain to his ‘patient’ without damaging anything vital.
In my own, uninformed opinion, I would say that it might be possible in some extreme cases but that most likely the person would pass out before any danger of dying…
dang…
got beat to it again…
That’s kind of what I meant, thanks. 
Let’s say there was no physical harm involved like cutting off limbs or anything… just that the brain was “sensing” pain, even if it wasn’t real. That’s what I was wondering. Has the brain ever been known to just shut off the body (=death) because it sensed that the pain is just too much?
This kind of reminds me of a story (urban legend?) that I once heard when I was younger. Supposedly a man in prison was told that he’d be killed by having his blood extracted from him, by needle or something. This wasn’t really true; instead they stuck a needle in him and showed him some type of container or bag where a red liquid was going into via a tube supposedly draining blood from his body. The red liquid was either not really blood or not really coming from his body. He believed that his blood was being drained out of his body and he died.
I didn’t feel like posting a separate thread about that story, but has anyone heard of it?
I’m not sure if it’s generally possible to die from severe acute pain (I say “generally” because I wouldn’t be surprised if it occasionally happened to particularly vulnerable people, but I think we’re talking about whether it’s possible to kill the average person with not-otherwise-lethal torture) that doesn’t go on for very long. But I would guess that it is – I bet that somebody working very, very hard at it could kill you from pain alone. It might take awhile, but I think it could be done. However, I don’t think it would be the sensation of pain itself that would kill you, but the secondary effects on the body. Here’s my reasoning.
Pain, especially the extended no-control-over-it and no-hope-because-death-is-going-to-be-your-only-relief type of pain that a torturer inflicts, typically does cause real physical changes to the body. The most significant changes (that I can recall at the moment) being:
- Stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol are poured into the blood
- Blood pressure and heart rate increase
- Breathing becomes shallower and more rapid
- Sweating increases
(Not surprisingly, people with untreated chronic pain, even from non-fatal problems, have a much higher mortality rate than normal. In a chronic pain support group I once worked with, the rate of strokes was nearly four times the national average.)
So I bet that a skilled torturer could inflict enough pain, at the right times and of the right type, to make you stroke out, or to cause your heart to give out from too much adrenaline, or something along those lines. It’s not the pain specifically that’s killing you, but then, whenever anybody claims that somebody was killed by fear, it’s never the fear itself that kills them by some kind of instant brain destruction or something – it’s always “and he had a heart attack and dropped dead on the spot!” So if you can say that fear killed them, then I think you could say that pain killed somebody who actually died from the secondary effects of pain.
Yes. In a roundabout way.
I suffer from chronic neuropathic pain, in which my brain interprets signals from my nerves as pain (wearing a hat gives me a headache). If the pain gets bad enough and I don’t have any medication (morphine at the moment), I will probably kill myself to stop the pain. Ergo: pain causes death.
Remember that pain is just your brain’s interpretation of an electrical signal.