[pain] notes

[kaberett]

Analogy of the day: car reversing sensors. Warn of impending, potential tissue damage, as distinct from actual tissue damage. Sometimes panic about A Plant, or The Bike Rack. Sometimes totally fail to miss the six-inch tall bollard that makes things go crunch in a way you don't notice until later.

Book purchase of the day: The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman, recced by a friend as popsci/popmed and one I'd nearly wound up buying yesterday anyway (... and a National Trust baking book to go with it).

Book purchase of the tomorrow, probably: Fitzgerald's Clinical Neuroanatomy and Neuroscience 7^th ed (2015), recommended via a NYU med student reading list (Cambridge's all appear to be paywalled and I'm sulking).

Links for further perusal: introductions to the nervous system on Biology LibreTexts and Health LibreTexts.

Reorganisation: possibly I am going to want to rewrite the introduction again (though the words do keep being useful), but crucially while murbling at A I think I have concluded that actually the reason the structure doesn't make sense is that neuroanatomy doesn't want to be the middle section, it wants to be an appendix. But I'll want to, er, know slightly more neuroanatomy before actually settling on that...

Comments

[highlyeccentric]

That is a good analogy and I shall borrow it.

[vass]

That's an interesting analogy: I do not have an reversing alert sound in my car, and this is a safety choice on my part. It would be too great a driving hazard. Sudden loud noises do not improve my reactions while driving. Because my reflex reaction to loud sudden noises is to go very still and hope they won't notice me and will go away. So that's very counterproductive if what I need to do is act rapidly, and the feeling of fighting through it is not at all unlike what I think my car would experience if I floored both the accelerator and the brake at the same time.

By analogy to pain... yeah, that holds true: the kinds of pain I am best at coping with fall into these categories:
1. Unambiguously "good pain", i.e. lactic acid burn, what some doctors do not even call pain.
2. It's fresh acute pain and I know exactly what caused it and where it's coming from and what to expect of it (getting a blood draw, getting an injection.)
3. It's neither of those things, but it's a form of pain for which "lie still and wait for it to go away" is the right treatment.