What does pain signify? A hypothesis concerning pain, the immune system and unconscious pain experience under general anesthesia.
Medical Hypotheses January 1, 2004 Yair Neuman
A case study of a person under deep sedation during colonoscopy shows that pain can be evident to the medical team (second-person perspective) while the patient reports no subjective pain (first-person perspective). This divergence suggests the intersubjective aspect of pain precedes the subjective experience, challenging the common representational view that places intrasubjective pain first. The author proposes that pain can be experienced unconsciously through the immune system, and hypothesizes that post-traumatic stress disorders following general anesthesia may result from this unconscious pain experience. If grounded, physicians should explore blocking unconscious pain without interfering with immune response and study pain as a complex cognitive and unconscious system analogous to the immune system.