“Tom alerted me to this fantastic brief case published in the British Medical Journal where a builder is admitted to hospital in great pain after a nail penetrated all the way through his boot. But it turned out that the pain was entirely psychological, as the nail had missed his foot by sliding between his toes.
“A builder aged 29 came to the accident and emergency department having jumped down on to a 15 cm nail. As the smallest movement of the nail was painful he was sedated with fentanyl and midazolam. The nail was then pulled out from below. When his boot was removed a miraculous cure appeared to have taken place. Despite entering proximal to the steel toecap the nail had penetrated between the toes: the foot was entirely uninjured.”
As Tom mentioned “One of the things I love about it is that the builder had no incentive to ‘fake’. He knew he should have acted tough so we know that the pain he felt wasn’t over-acting. It was imaginary pain, but it was real imaginary pain!”"
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Well, as Derren said at one point (in one of the broadcast stage shows).. papercuts don’t hurt until you realise you’ve got one, and then suddenly it’s the most painful thing ever.
This reminds me of when Derren had a man pick Styrofoam cups to stomp with his bare feet, having told him that there was a nail underneath one. I cringed throughout that whole segment.
This is very interesting and I guess the reverse of it is the placebo effect. I wonder if the pain this man felt would be equal to or feel the same as if the nail had actually penetrated his foot?
Nice one
not the first time like this though 
best ones are when someone eats snails without knowing and when it is mentioned that certain someone turns away in disgust while desperately trying to vomit or smth 
just excellent 
@Alyx I have to say that on the specific point of papercuts I disagee. Papercuts are painful (or sting a lt at least) because for good physiological reasons. The pain of injury however is I believe in large part related to the perceived injury. Consider cramp, which can cause such intense sensation of pain that you can be almost incapacitated, however the perception of the pain is much less knowing that it will pass without permanent damage. If by contrast you feel something unknown go pop or snap, the ensuing pain is much harder to bear.
ps, my odd grammar is the result of the concentration required to type on a broken keyboard :¬/
We are all living inside an imagination (:
I agree to a certain extent that pain can be intensified psychologically, or even be ‘imagined’ as this article suggests.
However, it’s a bit of a fleeting statement to suggest that the builder had no ‘incentive to fake’. In today’s society he probably thought he was onto a winner with some hefty compensation and a fortnight on the playstation! He may have genuinely thought that the nail had penetrated his foot, but maximised (or capitalised) the pain in order to make the claim more respectable… He may also have had Munchausen Syndrome!?
That is amazing, I’m now less scared of pain. Brilliant.
“real imaginary pain”? is that guy running fer public office?
That builder had better not get the idea that all pain he feels from now on is imaginary…
“Hmmm, this saucepan seems to be scalding me…But hey, if I can imagine a nail through my foot, I can imagine a searing hot pain in my hand. And I’m sure that’s not actually skin falling off there…”
I once got my thumb crushed in a spring loaded truck towing hook thing and was in agony until I noticed that the spring didn’t close it all the way and that my thumb wasn’t crushed at all, at which point I just felt a small bruise. So I concluded that one component of pain is fear. It’s not the only component though. This is probably also why hypnotherapists can do so much to control pain.
Like Derren said pain is subjective. No doubt that when you step on a nail that you feel it!
I did so when I was a kid and it was a small nail.
But the “nocebo” effect is very much real. 3 years ago I was cutting cheese cubes for my birthday and the cheese grater slid from the cheese and hit my left thumb.
It took 30 to 40 seconds to see that this cheese had this strange orange colour. I looked at my sweatshirt and it looked as if it came straight from the set of Friday the 13th. I looked at my thumb and saw it bleed like crazy I saw that I had sliced off half of the thumb nail from top to bottom. Then it started to hurt (crazy). I washed it off and then you actually feel the real nerve pain. I wrapped it up (it kept bleeding) and drove to my GP (steering with one hand). It was solved with a thick bandaid.
It’s like, when you look at something you’ve not realised you’ve done, your brain then suddenly thinks, ‘hang on, that should be hurting you….scream!’ and therefore you do.
I can think of 2 occasions where I did an injury to myself (one more severe than the other) and on neither occasion did I feel pain cos the shock etc, seemed to kick in first of all. Sort of protected me.
The first was when I went flying over the handlebars of my bike, which then fell on my head. My blonde hair proceeded to change to red. But I felt no pain. The other was when I sliced my thumb at school with a knife. I had my hands in my lap after & I had no idea I’d done it. No pain again.
Once I DID realise what had happened on both occasions and the reality slowly sunk in, boy, did it all hurt then!!
LC x
I work as a Play Specialist with kids in hospital and have done alot of work with psychological aspects of pain. We have run studies where children are given no numbing cream or spray before a cannula is inserted and are instead given a form of Top Down therapy,a therapy that focuses on taking the mind away from the pain. We get the children to sit down, close their eyes and then we talk them through a series of calming words and actions. Once they are calm we get them to keep their eyes closed and talk us through where they are in their mind through a series of open ended questions..i.e…what do you see around you?, whos with you? what are they doing? etc…the children are often so engrossed in discussing where they have gone in their imagination that 95% have no idea anything has been done to them.