People Who Can't Feel Pain

Congenital insensitivity to pain (CIPA), also known as congenital analgia is a very rare condition and the few people who have this condition cannot feel any sort of pain. Sounds good, right? Wrong. What many people don't realize is that this can be extremely dangerous.

This disorder is caused when a the nerves that sense pain does not connect with the part of the brain the recognizes pain. The reasons why this happens or what causes this to happen are unknown. Other sensory areas of people with CIPA are completely normal. As mentioned before, this is disease is incredibly rare and only 35 United States citizens have CIPA. Unfortunately, many people with CIPA don't live to see the age of 25. The rarity of this disease and the very low survival rate of it makes it difficult to study.

Not being able to feel pain is incredibly dangerous, especially for children. You need pain to tell you what you should and shouldn't do. You need pain to tell you when to move away from something because it is causing you harm. Most people try to avoid causing pain to themselves, but it is because they have felt pain that they are able to avoid those things that initially caused the pain.

A condition that is found in people with CIPA is Anhidrosis, which is the inability to sweat. This is also not a good thing. People with CIPA and Anhidrosis are unable to feel extreme temperature, this and not being able to sweat means that their body cannot regulate its temperature.

Children born with this need to be watched even more than normal children. They have to be taken to the doctor to make sure that they are okay and not suffering from anything that they are unaware of. They constantly have to be inspected to make sure that nothing is bleeding or otherwise wrong.

According to Pravda.com, a little girl suffering from CIPA put her hand on a hot oven and burnt her skin when she was three years old. She did not realize that anything was wrong and when her parents found her smiling with blood all over the kitchen, they were shocked. This poor girl also shredded her own lips when she began teething.

A 10 year old boy in china has a body temperature of 43 degrees, other than that he is perfectly healthy.

Another child with CIPA was born in the Soviet Republic of Georgia. This boy weighs 26 kilograms and has set a record in the Guinness Book.

A boy in Iraq has been awake for more than two years.

A 5-year-old in Hamburg is as strong as a teenager.

As you can imagine, Congenital insensitivity to pain is very serious. The reason few people with this don't live to be 25 is because they often catch a simple illness as most people do throughout the course of their life, but since they cannot feel it, they cannot notify anyone and cannot get the proper treatment.

CIPA is the rarest disease in the world and scientists still cannot come up with a cause.

References
"The Girl Who Can't Feel Pain," abcnews.go.com/GMA/health/story?id=1386322
"How CIPA Works," health.howstuffworks.com/cipa.htm/printable