Painless Life.

Complains. Sometimes it seems like life is all about complains. We focus more on the negative things than on the positive ones.

Pain. Pain is one of the principal sources of complains. Either emotional or physical, pain is popularly considered a burden. It exists to make us suffer, to make our lives more difficult.

Perspective.

What if it was possible to live a painless life?  How many of us would gladly stand in line for that? I would say quite a few. However, those people are not stopping to consider the possible consequences of not feeling pain.

Although pain is not pleasant at all, it exist for a reason. How could we know that we are healthy if we are not getting any feedback from our body? If I wouldn’t have felt that I stepped on a needle and cut myself, I may have ended up with a dangerous infection; if I weren’t feeling this pain in my side, I wouldn’t know that my appendix is about to break and I may die.

Unfortunately, a genetic condition that inactivates pain axons preventing people from feeling pain does exist. It is called Congenital Insensitivity of Pain with Anhidrosis (CIPA). Since this is a generic conditions people are obviously born with it. How can you explain a child the concept of danger when they do not know what pain is? It would be a little complicated to explain them that they should not chew on their fingers when they do not see anything wrong with it. Usually people with this condition do not live until adulthood because they die young due to some reckless activity or some illness which symptoms were not detected.

Here are two examples of what it is like to have CIPA. In the following video, although little Ashlyn suffered during her childhood adapting to her condition, nowadays she is way better and trying to make a difference for the future kids with her condition.

This other video shows the possible life-lasting consequences of the condition.

Alzheimer's Disease

Speech Problems?

Today we will talk about two different types of aphasia: Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia. Originally they were called that because they were the result of damage to the Broca’s area or Wernicke’s area.

However, today we use the terms to refer to the behavioral expressions of the damage regardless of its location.

Let’s begin with the Broca’s aphasia. this type of aphasia is characterized by the impairment in language production. That is, they have trouble expressing themselves not only verbally (speaking or writing), but also gesturing. They omit most pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, quantifiers, prepositions. They do, however, understand pretty well other people’s speech, as long as the structure of the sentences is not very complex. Although their perception of grammar is affected, it is not completely lost. When presented a sentence with incorrect grammar, they realize there ir something wrong in it even though they cannot tell exactly what it is. In the following video we can observe a patient suffering from Broca’s aphasia caused by a stroke. This video was taken about a year after she had the stroke.

 

 

On the other hand, Wernicke’s aphasia is also known as fluent aphasia. This is because people with this condition preserve the ability to speak  fluently; however, they have trouble recalling many words, therefore they have to stop while talking. In addition, their understanding of speech is poor. They often cannot make sense of what other people is saying or what they are reading. In the following video we see an interview of someone with Wernicke’s aphasia.

 

 

 

I hope that now we all understand the differences between Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasias better. If you didn’t, I invite you again to watch both videos they are really short and very informatives. Enjoy your spring break!