"CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta vividly remembers the day he impaled himself on a wrought iron fence. He had just turned 12, and he was running through the neighborhood when he spontaneously decided to vault over a fence that he usually ran around. Except he didn't quite make it. "One of the spikes caught me on my side and went in the back area of my side and out the front," Gupta says."
"Looking back now, he remembers feeling a strange sense of euphoria when it happened, which he attributes to his body's natural pain relief system. "For some people, it reacts really vigorously like really, really churns out a bunch of endorphins," he says. "And so you could have this really sort of ironic situation where you've got a terrible injury and you're almost laughing. It's a very protective sort of response from the body. And not everyone responds the same way.""
""With pain, people are usually hyper-focused on a particular sensation. Being able to take them out of that hyper-focus can be really helpful," he says. "The idea [is] that you could take someone's pain score from really terrible pain to a zero out of 10 ... for the 30 minutes that they are meditating. ... I think the brain can be trained that way.""
A childhood impalement produced an ironic euphoria attributed to the body's natural pain-relief system, which can release endorphins during severe injury. Endorphin responses vary among individuals, sometimes causing laughter despite serious wounds. Pain arises from both physical injury and brain processing errors. Medications can treat pain, but mental techniques such as distraction and meditation can reduce perceived pain by interrupting hyper-focus on sensation. Guided meditation can temporarily lower pain scores, demonstrating that the brain can be trained to modulate pain perception. Combining medical and cognitive strategies can create more effective, individualized pain management.
Read at www.npr.org
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