Topic header may be exaggerated.

I have some kind of condition that does not interfere with daily life (and would advantageous if only I was the fighting type) so it isn’t a big deal, so I am really just seeking answers out of curiosity.

It took about 20 years before I realized I even had this condition. Working at Pizza Hut part-time I had to wash some dishes and I filled the sink with water that was at just the perfect temperature to bring my condition to light.

Being right-handed, I put in the dishes with my right hand. Temperature was hot but not bad.

Then I grabbed the sponge with my right and pulled a dish out with my left. Temperature was overwhelmingly hot. I retracted my left hand and said, “What the fuck, did the water just suddenly get 20 degrees hotter?”

Hesitantly I put my right hand back. Temperature was hot but not bad. Then my left. Temperature was scorching.

It was the first time my subconscious understanding that things on my right half feels less than on my left became a conscious understanding. Looking back I realized that since birth I would always put my right side forward to take a blow, be it from a kick, punch, whatever. I guess until then I always just thought, “The right side is the natural side for taking a hit.”

The same applies to pain and cold. When I was still consciously new to this realization I switched an ice cream cone from my left hand (due to being too cold) to my right hand and suddenly thought, “Oh crap, it’s not cold at all; I better eat it before it melts.”

Since then I have gone to several doctors to have it examined. A CAT scan showed nothing in the brain (not no brain, just a brain with no contents (that’s a joke, for you see, I joke, by conjuring up jokes via the contents of my brain, of which there are none)) and one doctor did some ad-hoc tests but concluded I was simply making it up (though his tests were off the top of his head and I am not sure how they could be conclusive, since getting wrong answers means you are faking it, and getting right answers means you decide to answer in a way that allows you to fake it). Another doctor took it seriously and did a lot of tests but came up with no answers.

Basically no doctors I have met know what this condition is.

I posted on a medical forum about it and about a year later a woman replied saying she had the same thing, except it was her left side that was tougher.

She also posted things I did not post but that I have observed as well (which I did not consider being related). She gains no muscle mass on her weaker side, just as I do. I do push-ups often, and while both arms are doing the same amount of lifting only my right side actually gains muscle. She also said her left side gains fat more easily, which is true of my right side, though I have only had a BMI over 14 in the last few years so I hadn’t been able to notice until recently (and it’s still not that easy to notice).

Apparently this condition exists, but there is no name for it through my own research, and at best it seems to be very rare.

However I am definitely not alone:

http://www.healthboards.com/boards/neurology/883313-left-side-body-feels-more-pain-than-right-half.html

You will note that no actual doctors or medical practitioners replied. Also she was not the one who had it on her left side; that was another person who was yet another example that I am not alone.

My questions are:

1. Does anyone else have this? Note that you may need to experiment to really notice it, because growing up with it I never noticed until my hands went into that perfect range of water temperature where the difference was between comfortably hot and painfully hot.
2. Does anyone know about this and have a name for it?
3. If this is really an undocumented medical phenomena, should I be submitting myself to medical studies for the sake of making new medical discoveries?

This affliction covers my entire body directly down the middle from head-to-toe. The brain switches sides at the base of the skull, meaning your left brain controls your left face, but your right body, which suggests this is not at all related to the brain.

I am guessing this is not in medical databases for 2 reasons.

1. More people may have it than they know, because it took me 20 years to finally realize it, so many cases simply go unreported.
2. Even if you have it, it’s not typically seen as something to report. It’s advantageous, not something you want to cure. As frequently as I go to hospitals, it is nice to know that all I have to do is tell them to put the IV in my right arm and I am instantly free from the “this will sting a bit” they always suggest. I am instantly free from 50% of the pain caused by accidental bumps and bruises. When I was a kid taking a whipping from a branch or belt I simply put my right cheek forward to take the blows and then went on my way, letting them feel convinced they had somehow punished me.

So it is really only out of curiosity in pursuing this.

How does one pursue this anyway? If I want to have some doctor “discover” this “new” affliction.

L. Spiro

Brachial Plexus injury ?

Good blood circulation withstands changes in temperature as well as numerous other benefits.

You may have two genetic types. This is one possibility. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_%28genetics%29#Human_chimeras

Or you're very dominant on one side, which is usually observed by one side of the body being more muscular.

I considered damaged nerves, but this usually feels like parts of your body are cold. I heard about this directly from someone who can't feel their feet, so I don't think it's a nerve problem from what I read.

When showering, my feet are a great deal more sensitive to the hot water than my back is.

Using my chest as a "normal" to measure the relativity of everything else by:

Face = More sensitive (hot water doesn't "burn" my face, but it's unpleasant)

Back = Less sensitive (I have to turn the water hotter to please my back)

Feet = Incredibly sensitive - Water that feels "warm" to my chest feels incredibly hot to my feet. My feet turn red in the shower. I mean really red.

My feet also get really cold or really hot depending on the surrounding temperature of the environment. It's normal that you lose more heat from your limbs (face, hands, feet), but I'm used to that with my hands, and it feels different with my feet.

I used to take really hot showers and baths, and my not-medical opinion is that I've probably somehow thinned or burned off a layer of skin from my feet during the really hot showers and baths I used to take. I don't think I was born like this, I think it started around the time I was taking those hot showers/baths in my early teens, which is why I think there's a correlation.

If this only applied to your right hand, and not the entire right side of your body, I would've suggested that you might've done the same to your hand (sticking it into really really hot water one to many times).

But since it applies to one entire side of your body, then my theory doesn't apply to you (and since you are saying the opposite - one side is less sensitive than normal, not more).

For more armchair medical shots in the dark, do you sleep on your side, and is the side you sleep on the non-sensitive side? Then the question might be, do you sleep on that side because it's less-sensitive, or is your sleeping posture somehow related to the numbing of that side? Ofcourse, I sleep on my side also, and my body isn't noticeably less sensitive on one side.

I'd think chimera, but apparently that doesn't happen with a strong bilateral division in humans the way it does in some other animals:

On this cardinal the genetic difference is obvious because the red half is male, the whitish half female. But it can happen with both halves the same gender and be less obvious.

Well, you could run some experiments to try to eliminate possibilities...

Does the temperature difference balance out the closer you get to the center of your body? Or does it just suddenly change? If it suddenly changes, does the line at which it changes deviate from dead center at all?

Is there any difference in density of hair follicles, moles, or the rate at which your fingernails grow between the two halves?

Is there any difference in the density/appearance of blood vessels between the two halves?

Ha ha! Not to derail this thread, but I suffer from Bruxism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruxism

The sleep type. So sometimes, depending on my luck, I would wake up with bleeding inner mouth (which means my teeth grind the inner cheek(?), which at times would leave bite marks, and eating solid would be painful. So yeah, I didn't know I actually suffer from it until later in my teens that my older brother told me that i grind my teeth in my sleep, and been doing this ever since i was a child. I just that now it become louder.

As for the complain regarding doctor, at least IMHO, which is not related to this illness, since in my country the healthcare is free. I sense that the doctor is doing a triage. If it something not lethal or will not harm in the long run, they will not care - 'its all in your head'. I once shit oil, and the doctor just describe simple stomach ache pills. Thank god it was not something dangerous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escolar

(so someone lied about the type of fish they serve at the hotel, labelling it white tuna).

Then again, maybe we shouldn't expect a doctor to know about all illness under the sun (although this do lead to sad cases when a patient kept being turned home until nothing could no longer be done).

Anyway, yeah, I understand how you feel. Maybe I should warm up a pot of water and test this behaviour if i remember.

Brachial Plexus injury ?

My condition covers my whole body. It’s just a split in sensation down the middle.

You may have two genetic types.

I can’t rule out anything, but I may have been wrong about the specifics on where the brain switches control, and switching control may not be related to feeling pain, this is most likely something to do with the brain.

Feet = Incredibly sensitive

That’s atypical; due to the distance from your brain sensation in feet is typically decreased, which is why in the extreme example of Robert Wadlow it is said that he could hardly feel his feet at all. Your mileage feetage may vary.

do you sleep on your side, and is the side you sleep on the non-sensitive side?

I used to tend to sleep in any position, but at some point while I lived in Thailand I awakened one day to find myself swallowing saliva non-stop every 30 seconds or so. Perhaps a variant of bird flu or something that made one gland active non-stop all day every day for about a year. Worst year of my life.
As a result, I was forced to sleep on my left (weak) side to let it drain it out of my mouth instead of back into my throat.
Since it lasted for a whole year my neck’s natural posture slowly shifted to the left.
Now I can sleep on either side again but only because of a gradual pain in my neck I typically shift back to the left side after a while.

Does the temperature difference balance out the closer you get to the center of your body? Or does it just suddenly change?

Suddenly changes.

does the line at which it changes deviate from dead center at all?

No.

Is there any difference in density of hair follicles, moles, or the rate at which your fingernails grow between the two halves?

No.

Is there any difference in the density/appearance of blood vessels between the two halves?

No.

Do you get goosebumps on one side before the other?

Hard to tell since it is rare to get them and I had never paid attention prior to her asking.
Since then I have tried to pay attention, but most of the time I get goosebumps it is not related to temperature, so I still have no conclusive data.

(so someone lied about the type of fish they serve at the hotel, labelling it white tuna).

You can probably sue for that.

After making this thread I e-mailed an acquaintance, Dr. Steven Halls, famous for his talking moose Mac application from days gone by.

He forwarded it to his son who is a medical student at Johns Hopkins and has plenty of contacts with prominent neurologists. After the holidays are done and he gets back to classes he will ask around to see if anyone knows about this condition. If not, we may set up a meeting to do a series of tests to investigate it.

Until then, guesses are still welcome, and especially if anyone actually has heard of this and has a name for it.

L. Spiro

There's quite a few common medical anomalies that aren't really researched. My girlfriend has a condition (?) called ASMR

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_meridian_response

Which has basically no research in it. Basically if she's relaxed and watching something that requires focus without focusing (Watching sand fall, for example), her scalp feels tingly.

Dr. Halls e-mailed me again with some terms to Google (dermatome map head, trigeminal nerve nuclei, Spinothalamic tracts, etc.)

The V1, V2, and V3 facial regions for example. He suggested I test these separately to see if all are on the same side as the rest of my body.

Testing these empirically is hard because you have to inflict “measured” pain on each side, and you never know if you are going easy with a pin just for fear of hurting yourself, so I came up with a method: pluck hairs from each side (beard, mustache, and eyebrows).

Result: In all 3 cases my reaction to a pluck from the right side was, “Ouch, that stings.” My reaction to the left side was, “HOLY MOTHER OF FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER,” accompanied by a little dance.

If I have some kind of lesion or something then these tests indicate it happens after the fibers of the trigeminal nerve cross the midline.

When he mentioned the trigeminal nerve, it reminded me of another “condition” I have (or don’t have?): I don’t get ice-cream headaches.

Since both are related to the trigeminal nerve, it makes sense that both could be a byproduct of some kind of problem/misconfiguration of the trigeminal nerve.

I never in a million yoctoseconds considered that the sensory problem and lack of ice-cream headaches might be related, so I never thought to ask the only other 2 I have encountered with the sensation problem if they also have no ice-cream headaches.

How many here do not have ice-cream headaches?

If you don’t, can you test your sensory systems on each half of your body? One way could be to simply see how long you can hold ice cubes in each hand.

L. Spiro