Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Why do we get Itchy

Have you ever been laying in bed and the next minute you feel you want to scratch yourself cause you start feeling itchy, well if you dont it happens to me. I can be laying in bed about to go to sleep tucked under my blankets about to go to sleep and feel i want to scratch a part of my face.

I know you can get itchy from dust around you or if you have a dry skin but wondered why.

So of course im going to tell you all why

It seems that that some of the Nerves in our body are dedicated to the Itch feeling where others are there to feel pain and the such.

What happens is that the hair on our body reacts when a stimuli like dust or hair touches, you automatically want to rid yourself of the sensation so you scratch, this is the most simplest explanation.

Itching can happen for more than a piece of dust or hair touching you, things such as:
  • Mosquitoes, mites, snails, lice
  • Poison ivy, poison oak, stinging nettle
  • Dry skin
  • Jewelry
  • Herpes
  • Stress and anxiety
  • Staph infections
  • Psoriasis
  • Sunburn
  • Soaps and frequent hand washing
Myself i suffer from eczema which can be really annoying, the simplest way ive found to treat it was to keep my skin clean, or on really bad days to use cornflour.

There is a more technical version of course with what happens

Itching, is known as pruritus, it starts with some kind of external stimuli, including bugs, dust, clothing fibers and hair. Itching is a built-in defense mechanism that alerts your body to the potential of being harmed. In this case, it might be the potential of being bit by a bug.

Receptors in the dermis of the skin will become irritated. In a split second, these receptors send a signal through fibers in the skin to your spinal cord and then up to the cerebral cortex in your brain.

By scratching you are moving the irritant which sends a message to the brain that the irritant has been removed

I got this information from two sites, the links are below
Link1
Link2.
.
.

0 comments: