• Question: if are skin is ment to protect are organs and bones why does it hurt when we hurt are skin ?

    Asked by rachelbowesxx to Amy, Drew, Julia, Kimberley, Sara on 20 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Julia Griffen

      Julia Griffen answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Interesting thought….We have thousands of nerve endings in our skin, that’s how we know what we’re touching and makes us sensitive to heat, and pressure… If we didn;t ‘feel’ anything through our skin we wouldn’t know if something was hot and could burn and damage us, or if something was sharp and could cut us. The sense of touch, and therefore pain that we have in our skin is a defence mechanism to keep us safe… So i guess in a round about way it is protecting our organs in more than one way 🙂

    • Photo: Amy MacQueen

      Amy MacQueen answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Hey rachel!

      If you think about it its better for our skin to hurt so that our insides don’t! Our skin is the first line of defence – as Julia said the nerves in our skin tell us when something is not nice and that stops us going too close, touching things we shouldn’t or staying in harmful environments for too long. If we didn’t hurt our skin when things like this happened we wouldn’t know that it was a harmful thing to do – the pain teaches us. One way you can see this going wrong is in leprosy where someone loses feeling in certain parts of the body due to the disease and ends up hurting themselves because thet can’t feel pain.

      So pain can be a useful thing – although it hurts!!! 🙂

    • Photo: Kimberley Bryon

      Kimberley Bryon answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      Amy and Julia have explained this well Skin hurts when we damage ourselves as a warning system so we don’t do further damage.

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