I was watching the “Outsiders” episode of “Taboo” which had a segment about a leper colony in Nepal. It made the claim that the horrible deformities you see in lepers is not from the disease itself but rather from injuries that occur to loss of sensitivity which go untreated. Is this true? I could see someone with loss of feeling burn themselves or get a cut without noticing if they don’t feel it, but that doesn’t seem to be enough to explain the massive deformities shown in the episode. Do these people really not notice common injuries long enough for them to become crippling deformities or loss of body parts? Or do people in these regions just live a much harder life, prone to more severe injury? Especially odd are the deformities in the face, and area I wouldn’t think would be as prone to injury, and things like the eyes glazing over with white.
It’s true. The problem is that without pain signals, people tend to keep doing things that ordinarily start to hurt after a short period of time. They keep walking for miles without shifting pressure to different part of their feet, since their feet don’t start hurting, and tiny bone chips start breaking off and damage starts building up. They don’t toss and turn while sleeping, because lying on the same spot for hours doesn’t hurt, so they end up with huge pressure sores. Their eyes don’t hurt, so they don’t blink, and tiny scratches and injuries accumulate and end up blinding them.
The book The Gift of Pain goes into great detail about how it was discovered that it is indeed the lack of pain sensation, not the disease itself, that causes the horrifying deformities of leprosy.