Pain question

Factual Questions
1

I understand that pain is a signal telling you that something’s wrong or damaged in the body and that whatever you did to cause the pain, you should stop doing (in general terms). However, I have some back issues, namely a desiccated L4 disc which I can usually manage. Every three or four years, though, it kicks in and brings with it a festival of pain. But nothing’s actually damaged; it just hurts if I do certain things a certain way. If I was a real man, could I just “push through” and ignore the pain so that I could continue doing what I do for the duration (a week or two) of the festival of pain or would there actually be some real damage being done?

I assume that chronic pain sufferers must wonder this as well.

Thanks

2

My guess (IANAMD) would be that, in the situation you describe, yes, some damage is being done, though maybe not as much as the amount of pain you feel might seem to indicate. The thing is, though, that although it is true that pain exists in order to warn us about damage our bodies might be suffering, it is far from a perfectly reliable signaling system. Most of the time it does work quite well, but it is entirely possible to experience a lot of pain when there is little or no damage actually occurring, or, sometimes, little or no pain when something really bad is happening to us. The pain nerves sometimes fire when they don’t really need to, or fail to fire when they should.