This is actually an interesting topic, I think.
This debate started in the Poor Chickens topic, and hopefully will end here.
Can you die via pain?
We've all heard the urban legend of the guy who drempt he was being executed via guilotine and his wife poked him in the neck with a pin to wake him up, and he died. (Which couldn't possibly be true, because how would we know what he was dreaming?)
I've heard war-stories and the like of people going into shock from pain, but not quite death, I don't think. It was always the wound that killed them, not the pain.
So if you have any evidence backing or denying that you can, if fact, die via pain, debate away!!
P.S. This is directed at humans, not chickens.
Yes it is possible to die from pain (infact people can die from non painful things like being FORCED to be near their phobia).
I've never heard of someone with a fear of hights die from looking off a cliff.
Pain is an alarm system, you cant die from it. You can only die from what caused the pain.
I'd think you would pass out if the pain was too much. The pain itself wouldn't kill you, it's the actual physical effects as warhammer said which cause the pain.
Also and about the phobias, I think that is due to the intense mental fear that is so great the people's hearts are probably racing and stuff and are over exhausting themselves or something.
Hmm, however, I think that the pain may cause you to be unable to do somethings. But then again the pain is a result of something else. It reflects what has been done to yourself.
Pain and fear can both overload the brain and just becaus you haven't heard that somebody died from looking over a cliff means it never happened, also if it nver happened then thats because they could get away from the situation before being overstimulated.
Dieing from pain? Never heard of it. Dieing from fear, I have heard of...not pain though.
It wouldn't be a direct result of the pain/fear... it would be like a side effect... like a heart attack or inability to breathe. How is it possible that a few (very few) people survived the holocaust? Without being super human God people, they couldn't have gone through the most pain/suffering/fear etc. realistically plausible for our time. It's just *nerves, nerves can't kill you as far as I know.
*Nerve:
1. Any of the cordlike bundles of fibers made up of neurons through which sensory stimuli and motor impulses pass between the brain or other parts of the central nervous system and the eyes, glands, muscles, and other parts of the body. Nerves form a network of pathways for conducting information throughout the body.
I guess the closest would be overpressure on the heart caused by an immense amount of stress, leading to cardiac arrest. But pain itself doesn't cause a heart attack, things that may go along with it could.
Anyway, "pain" is actually a feeling, Unless you commit a suicide it can't kill you.
If you commit suicide with a revolver, it's not the pain that killed you, it's the bullet.
There was an experiment they performed in Communist Russia which involved making a prisoner believe that they were going to die and thus making them die anyway.
The prisoner was blindfolded and sat on a chair. Two guards held him while a doctor said that he was going to insert two tubes into the prisoner's back and pipe out his blood into a sink behind the prisoner. He then stuck a couple of needles into the condemned man's back and told him that he had put the tubes in. After this, he turned on the taps/faucets in the sink and made remarks like 'It's very red, isn't it?' The prisoner died within 5 minutes and the autopsy revealed the cause of death as the kind of shock caused by severe blood loss.
The human mind does appear to have the ability to make us die when we haven't suffered enough physical damage to kill us.
QUOTE(Crayak @ Oct 20 2005, 04:30 AM)
I've heard war-stories and the like of people going into shock from pain, but not quite death, I don't think. It was always the wound that killed them, not the pain.
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Yeah you can go into a coma and die from that but pain itself will never kill you.
ADDITION:
QUOTE(CaptainWill @ Oct 22 2005, 06:55 AM)
There was an experiment they performed in Communist Russia which involved making a prisoner believe that they were going to die and thus making them die anyway.
The prisoner was blindfolded and sat on a chair. Two guards held him while a doctor said that he was going to insert two tubes into the prisoner's back and pipe out his blood into a sink behind the prisoner. He then stuck a couple of needles into the condemned man's back and told him that he had put the tubes in. After this, he turned on the taps/faucets in the sink and made remarks like 'It's very red, isn't it?' The prisoner died within 5 minutes and the autopsy revealed the cause of death as the kind of shock caused by severe blood loss.
The human mind does appear to have the ability to make us die when we haven't suffered enough physical damage to kill us.
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I wouldn't take anything that Communist Russia as proof for anything other than tyranny never wins.
Quite apparently, human mind, thought, and psychology do have more than a noticable effect on our physical well-being.
Look at placebos.
More importantly, look at nocebos; a patient believes that the drug will result in adverse effects, and yet, despite normally not doing so, his beliefs are eventualy confirmed.
But does that apply to feeling pain as well?
The USSR Experiment was death by fear, not pain.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Death by fear? Fear is another alarm, you can faint but not die.
Its not the actual pain as much as it it the fact that the pain causes cardiac arrest and a host of other side-effects of fear and pain.
The pain could possibly kill you by sensory overload, but why kill someone with pain? It's cheaper and more effective to give a person a nice nine-millimeter hemorrhage.
QUOTE(Crayak @ Oct 22 2005, 06:43 PM)
The USSR Experiment was death by fear, not pain.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
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Yeah, kind of. They were seeing if they could kill him by making him believe he was dying.
It's all related to the human mind though.
The thing with humans believing in something is that that's just it. They're believing in it. They're in control of that belief. So in a way, they're effecting themselves because of that control. But I'd say pain is different. It's not a belief, its a feeling. While humans do have the capacity to control their feelings, they can't do so entirely. In any case, the pain itself isn't deadly, it's how the human reacts to it that counts. If it were, say, the Buddha in that situation, then the pain wouldn't effect him at all, other then a sensory overload, and the worst that would do is knock him out of consciousness. If it were Bush...well, that's a special case. You can never tell how much a mind that stupid can ignore... but in the case of the average person, they might believe that they're in a going to die, and in that way, kill themselves.
Pain is not an outside force, the body creates pain to tell something is wrong, so it's like a feeling.
Being sad doesn't kill you, it's what YOU decide to do about being sad.
QUOTE(Infested-Jerk @ Oct 22 2005, 03:08 PM)
Pain is not an outside force, the body creates pain to tell something is wrong, so it's like a feeling.
Being sad doesn't kill you, it's what YOU decide to do about being sad.
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That's what I just said. But pain isn't entirely under your control. Though it's true that you create the feeling, you can't control it, you can only ignore it. It's neither created nor controled by your conscious form, else I wouldn't be as sore as I am right now.(P.E. was hell on thursday...) Once again, in terms of the psyche effecting the body, it's the reaction that counts, not the situation one is put in. (pain/fear, all that good stuff...)
That's why I can bite my arm until it bleeds and not feel any pain?
Or take a baseball to the shoulder, arm, leg, anything but the face/ nuts without feeling any pain?