There are people who have never felt pain in their lives. They are not exaggerating, and they do not have a high threshold: their nervous system, following instructions written in their DNA, simply does not process that signal. The condition is called congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP) and is caused by mutations in genes such as SCN9A, NTRK1, PRDM12, or FAAH-OUT, which affect nociceptors, the cells responsible for detecting and transmitting damage to the brain.
The most well-documented case is that of Jo Cameron, a British woman who discovered her condition at age 65 when she insisted she did not need anesthesia during hand surgery. The anesthetists, bewildered, referred her to specialists at University College London and the University of Oxford, who published their findings in the British Journal of Anaesthesia in March 2019. Cameron not only does not feel pain: she also experiences neither fear nor anxiety, and researchers observed that her wounds heal faster than normal. Doctors believe there may be many more people with similar mutations who have never detected it.
What seems like a superpower is, in reality, a biological trap: without pain as a warning signal, fractures, burns, and infections progress without the body giving any warning at all. Science, however, looks at these genes with another goal: understanding how they block pain could open the way to new analgesics for the 330 million patients who undergo surgery each year around the world.