Author: Stephen Johnson / Source: Big Think
- A woman in Scotland was found to feel virtually no pain and report zero trace of any anxiety or depression.
- Her body also seems to heal injuries very quickly, leaving little or no scarring.
- Humans feel pain as a warning before serious injury occurs, so it’s not necessarily desirable to feel absolutely no pain.
When 66-year-old Jo Cameron was about to undergo a typically painful hand surgery a few years ago, she informed the doctor that she didn’t feel pain and wouldn’t need anesthesia.
“I disregarded her, actually,” Dr. Devjit Srivastava, a consultant in anesthesia and pain medicine at Scotland’s Raigmore Hospital, told Time. “I couldn’t believe her.”
Srivastava gave her anesthesia anyway. But after the procedure, Srivastava was surprised to learn that Cameron didn’t request or take any of the recommended painkillers, and a look into her medical past revealed that she’d never reported experiencing pain or needing painkillers, despite having endured childbirth, broken bones, and cuts. She’d been burned once, too, an injury she only noticed after smelling burning flesh.
After visiting pain geneticists in England, Cameron learned that she has two extremely rare genetic mutations that make her insensitive to pain. The mutations also seem to play a role in her body’s ability to recover from injuries “quickly with…
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