🚀 go-pugleaf

I have a mate who suffered a brachial plexus lesion after an accident,
and when the arm withered went for voluntary amputation.

the amputation saved the hassle of the awkward bit of "baggage"
attached to his right shoulder and always getting in the way.

the amputation made no difference whatsoever to the pain, which is
considerable.

his SO is a senior medical person here (UK) so he always had the best
treatments and cutting edge stuff, just last year or so "they" (meaning
doctors and consultants) accepted, as a result of completely new tests,
that the pain he was feeling was in fact "real" pain and not "phantom"
pain, as pretty much 99.999% of doctors prior to these tests
insisted... "it's all in your head"

I'm not a doctor or bio-chemist or chemist, but it seems to me that
there is something in the bio-chemical nature of the nervous system
that.

a/ once a nervous system matures, permamently remembers that neural
map, so that no matter what happens to it, it remembers what it should
be like.

b/ once a severe trauma occurs, it permanently remembers the last
signal sent, and nothing but a subsequent "all is well" signal from an
original subnet that matches the "remembered" neural map will turn it
off.

I can see the survival benefit, major injury, do not use limb until it
heals, healing = signals returning from limb return to normal state,
this makes a much simpler feedback system that one that monitors
progress incrementally.

so basically I wouldn't bet you tuppence that your dead cells would
stop hurting until you apply some miracle stem cell replacement skin
salve...