Thursday, January 30, 2014

Pain Response Changes Due to HRT


The purpose of this note is to provide anecdotal evidence in support of the statement that cognitive-evaluative pain in recollections of actual accidents jumps sharply due to exposure to sustained elevation of estrogen levels and/or testosterone poisoning in the brains of trans women (people would prefer omitting the and/or aspect in the assertion, but I am not certain).

When people recollect incidents involving physical pain from a present perspective, then they would tend to re-evaluate the pain or suppress or avoid it in various ways - not that this process alters the original memory of the incident. It is also well known that pain is multi-dimensional in nature with one of the dimensions corresponding to cognitive-evaluative pain.

While playing at home (I was about twelve years old then), I suffered a deep injury below my knee by accidentally smashing my knee into a glass window pane. Smashing into a glass pane was easy, but the pane was only partly broken and it was the retraction of my leg that caused the sharp edges to cut muscles further. I did not panic, scream or cry and was clearly aware of navigating the sharp edges (even though it was a matter of few seconds). The "full thickness" wound needed many stitches. A pain level estimate would be 6 in the scale of 11.

In recollections of the incident in pre-full-HRT stages, my reevaluations of pain and other emotions of the scene involved "nothing special". Obviously I am talking simulations here. But in last few months (as of this writing), reevaluations of pain of "sharp glass cutting muscles part" have become more severe and generate sharp emotions. I am reading this as a completion process of response that happens by aggregation.

Apart from the many conjectures and studies that this account suggests (given the limited  number of studies on the topic), I am also interested in formal models that capture aspects.


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