We’ve reached the time of year when the outdoors-challenged among us have to make a hard decision.
It’s ninety-five degrees out, the biting insects are swarming, and there’s a brick patio to lay. Do I
a. cover up from head to toe and risk heat exhaustion?
b. strip down to stay cool, offering ten square feet of exposed skin to whatever bloodsucking insect happens to be in the market for a snack?
c. slather on the DEET, and risk side effects such as headache, weakness, shortness of breath, and sleeping alone, thanks to my chemical stench?
Last weekend I chose badly. I went with b. I’ve been paying the price ever since.
Just as there are some people who don’t react to poison ivy (hate you!), there are some who don’t have much of a reaction to bug bites (hate you even more!).
Those of you who fall into these two categories should read no further. I won’t ask you to try to understand. You’ve been blessed with a more advanced body than mine. “What’s the big deal?” you’ll say to yourself. “You get a bite? Ignore it, maybe put some cream on it. Boom! Problem solved.”
Ah, but there’s the rub. So to speak.
Some people are simply itchier than others. It’s time I broke my shameful silence: I’m one of the very, very itchy ones.
If I happen to have, say, fifteen or twenty bites on my legs, leftovers from the mosquito feeding frenzy of last weekend, there will be extreme itching. No matter how much hydrocortisone cream I cake on, no matter how many Benedryl liqui-gels I pop, I will wake every hour of the night to claw at my own flesh like a mad raccoon.
But why?
I never really asked myself that simple question before: why do people itch?
It turns out that, like many fundamental medical questions, such as “Why do people age?” and “Why do I sweat like Niagara Falls when it’s warmer than 75 degrees?”, the question of itching is actually something of a medical mystery.
For a long time, itching was thought to be a kissing cousin of pain, mainly because the nerve systems in our skin for itching and pain are very similar.
But, unlike pain, which seems like a sensible way for a mammal to protect itself from harm – as in, “Ow, that flame is hot, perhaps I should pull my hand away from the fire!” – itching doesn’t really do much to keep us out of trouble.
It’s true that if an insect lands on my calf, and I feel a little tickle, I might take a swipe at it. But most insects are gone long before the itching starts. Mosquitoes, for instance, use their clever saliva as an anti-coagulant. The saliva keeps our blood flowing down their gullets so they can make a quick getaway before we even notice them sipping our sangria.
Mosquito saliva causes a kind of mini-allergic reaction at the site of the bite. The body produces histamines, which trigger inflammation and, with it, itchiness. If you’re not a highly allergic person, this is no big deal. But if you are, your body reacts to mosquito saliva, which is relatively harmless, as if it were something seriously bad, like venom. This idiotic misunderstanding of the immune system will be familiar to readers who suffer from ragweed allergies. Ragweed sufferers – in other words, people like me –are the victims of a cruel joke: the immune system misinterprets a harmless bit of pollen as a dangerous pathogen, which triggers an all-out intruder alert. The body uses all of the tools at its disposal to get rid of the evil invader – sneezing, coughing, watering eyes, and everybody’s favorite, a tsunami of mucus.
But back to itching. Everybody knows that itching isn’t helpful. “Stop scratching that!” is one of the key phrases of parenthood. Excessive scratching can lead to breaking the skin, which can lead to infection, and then, following the inescapable logic of my grandparents, inevitably to gangrene and amputation.
So why does scratching feel so good? Although science can’t say much about the function of itching, a few things can be said about scratching. First of all, it’s an unconscious reflex, which explains why it’s so hard to keep from doing it. Second of all, scratching an itch lights up the pleasure centers of brain, perhaps as a reward for removing a potentially dangerous irritant from the skin.
Ironically, one of the only ways to defeat an itch is with pain. Pain somehow short-circuits the skin’s itching nerves and keeps them from communicating with the spine and brain. Which is why you’ll find helpful advice on the Web like, “Pinching bug bites really hard makes them stop itching!”
Personally, I’ve had it with itching. I think itching is an evolutionary mistake, and certainly grounds for a recall. In my humble opinion, itching should be abolished.
In fact, I’m going to write a letter to my Congressman about it.
Right after I find that tube of cortizone.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 19 August 2010
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
