Thursday, January 5, 2017

What medical condition do you have that you thought was absolutely normal?

Congenital thermal allodynia.

I've only recently discovered this. It appears to be related to a variation in a receptor called TRPA1. Put simply, I perceive variations in temperature, particularly cold, as pain.

Ice cubes touching me? Painful. Cold showers? Agonizingly painful.

Until very recently, I had no idea this was not the norm. I'd always thought that people use cold showers as a folk remedy to unwanted sexual arousal because the pain jolts them out of a sexy mental headspace, and the people who do things like go swimming in icy water were hard-core masochists. I had no idea these experiences are not excruciatingly painful to other people.



Read other answers by Franklin Veaux on Quora: Read more answers on Quora.

from Quora http://ift.tt/2hWKPbb

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