Is the pain worse or not?

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If you have AS are you more senstive to physical pain than an NT person or not?

Everyone is different.

Some are hypersensitive to pain, others are hyposensitive.

Personally I am hypersensitive and get rather upset when someone touches me. When I'm actually hurt, I feel the pain stronger than the average person. However when its a dull sensation, and not a sharp pain, I don;t notice it near as much. For example if I were to sprain my ankle, that pain would feel less painful to me than to others.

i guess everyone is different. sometimes if i dont know whats going on i can stand alot of pain, othertimes if i know whats going to happen i usually cant get over how painful it is.

like going to the dentist

Last edited by richardbenson on 30 Oct 2010, 8:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

AFAIK, the pain is not worse, we just feel it 'more' for some reason. Subjectively, it will feel worse.

How would I know? I've never been NT.

I am almost immune to physical pain. It's really, really, really, annoying because people think I have a low tolerance to pain. In grade 5, we played a game and I fell and so did another girl earlier in the game and she thought it would hurt me but not the other girl. It didn't hurt AT ALL!

Actually, it is a common symptom in autistic individuals to not feel pain at all or to a much lesser degree. That is why some children can bang their head against things for long periods of time.

I'd much rather have someone hit me than brush against me. I have a late reaction to pain. I remember falling as a kid and I'd have bloody legs and knees but I wouldn't cry soon enough for it to be normal because I processed it slowly. People that say things when stubbing their toes don't make sense to me either.

I know I'm hypersensitive to pain because things hurt me a lot that are only supposed to hurt mildly, like brushing my hair. I always thought volleyball was a ridiculous sport - if you didn't hit the ball then everyone screamed at you, and if you did hit it, it hurt so badly.

However, I think when the pain is really bad, I start tuning it out. I lose body awareness. To take a trivial example, I feel hungry when I'm not very hungry, and when I get really hungry, I don't feel the hunger anymore and don't even know that I'm hungry. I think something analogous to this happens to me with pain - but it's hard to say. I sprained my foot recently but it took me a while to find out it was sprained because I didn't really feel the pain; and then I actually felt the pain more as the sprain healed.

Last edited by PangeLingua on 30 Oct 2010, 8:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't really feel pain at all, unless it is something inside me, like stomach pains, heart pains, etc.. and even then I can handle it pretty well.

I wouldn't know because I don't know how they feel.

Me neither. I barely notice injuries until after the fact. I played the entire second half of a game with a broken arm and barely noticed it. I have gone running and came back with my sock being soaked in blood. Where cuts and bruises happen are a mystery to me.

I guess my pain threshold is about average but I do have a high tolerance. I've sprained my ankles and continued to walk for two more days without limping before going to a doctor

I'm not very sensitive to pain. I have a pretty high threshold for it.

I always wondered how other people didn't seem phased by how painful hitting the ball was. It never even occurred to me that it might not be hurting them as much as it hurt me. I have a similar problem with playing the guitar (acoustic, anyway--electric is fine): holding down the strings can be immensely painful for me, so I usually can only play one or two songs at most. And I can't use the touchpad on most laptops because the fine coarseness hurts my fingertips. I think I only experience more pain than most people in my hands, come to think of it.

Speaking for myself, aside from my hands, it is not that I don't feel pain as much as other people, but I am better at "trucking along" despite pain. I can be in quite a lot of pain without anyone knowing or noticing. I think most people are more inclined to share their pain.

It depends on what kind of pain. I had my bottom wisdom teeth removed with a local and accidently cut myself and needed stitches and wasn't fully numb when they put them in. I had blood drawn and didn't even feel it. I had my top wisdom teeth removed with general anestesia and was back to myself as soon as it wore off. My mouth wasn't even sore. I can be fine with pain like that yet when I was a little kid I would have meltdowns becuase my loose teeth bothered me so much. I've always felt like I was going to faint or pass out if someone or something touched my knees or elbows when they were unbent but every doctor would shrug it off and say it was "because of the autism". I still have this problem but I've learned to deal with it and chiropractic adjustments seem to help a lot. I know there is so much hating on chiropracters and holistic medicine but most traditional doctors refuse to hear me out and everything is "because of the autism". I guess if I had a heart attack or got shot, that would happen "because of the autism" as well and they couldn't treat it "because of the autism". I think I have a high pain tolerence when it comes to things like cuts and getting hit by trains but I can't tolerate things like plants brushing up against me(the opening sequence of Little House on the Prairie" makes me cringe).

I'm currently getting chiropractic treatments for an injury that regular medical doctors told me was untreatable, and it appears to be helping. I'm glad you are having success. I had one doctor basically tell me that I was a hypochondriac for complaining about what I later learned was a significant injury that probably should have gotten me to complain much more loudly than I did.