>the chronic pain tells your body not to try walking/working until the situation fully heals Yes, I mentioned that reason in my original post. My query [if Ev

>the chronic pain tells your body not to try walking/working until the situation fully heals Yes, I mentioned that reason in my original post. My query [if Evolution can be queried] is why the need for such intense levels of chronic pain? A tolerable ache in a part of the body will automatically make you aware of the need to treat it carefully. I can't see why 100s of 1000s of years of evolution has selected for a nervous system which cranks the pain up to 11 and then maintains it at that level for days, weeks or [in some poor folks' cases], months or years on end, with no respite. You'd have thought that, over the course of human evolution, natural selection would have weeded out the specimens whose nervous systems render them practically incapacitated for days on end, on account of relatively trivial injuries. I mean, look at toothache [which I mentioned in passing in my original post]. People have been driven to the brink of insanity with the pain from a broken tooth. Yet what does a broken tooth matter? Humans can still function perfectly adequately after losing all their teeth and a broken tooth can still function almost as well as a whole one. Yet the nervous system often renders people barely able to function, on account of a broken tooth. Conversely people can be suffering from life threatening heart conditions, kidney disease, liver disease etc. without ever realising it. I seems the nervous system has a very arbitrary 'level of pain = seriousness of injury' scale, when it comes to alerting us that things are wrong with parts of the body.