Why doesn't it hurt?

[fivemack]

I've had the misfortune to have verrucas on my feet for the last year or so, on which I've tried a wide range of over-the-counter remedies which don't work. Scholl's verruca-removing pads seem to have been designed by someone utterly unaware of the idea of socks - the plaster sticks to the socks, moves, and applies skin-dissolving salicylic acid to something other than the verruca; the various brands of salicylic acid with plasticiser take impractically long to set, even if you wave your feet in the air with gay abandon for several minutes.

So I've tried something which liquifies dimethyl ether by heat-of-evaporation of propane (possibly the other way round - it's an aerosol can with those ingredients); the cryogen soaks up into a little foam stick which you then apply to your feet. It's probably seventy degrees colder than ambient.

I wonder why this is so much psychologically easier than a model where you heated a little brand in vigorously-boiling water and then applied it to the feet.

This method doesn't work either; I'll have to go to a GP and ask for proper removal with liquid nitrogen. Which is 200 degrees below ambient, equivalent to heating the little brand in a gas flame; I've had this done before, it hurt, but it didn't hurt anything like as much as you'd have imagined the brand would.

Am I missing something obvious, or is this simply that you can visualise hot-burns more easily than cold-burns?

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I've had liquid N applied to a finger, and while it wasn't exactly pleasant, it's not at the level that I'd demand anaesthetic if it were required again (for that matter I think I could perfectly easily do it to myself). It is curious that cold burns seem easier than hot ones; I wonder if it's something do with having spent (at least) several millions years evolving in a hot climate, where cold burns would have presumably been unheard of, and only routinly encountered very cold temperatures in the last hundred K years or so.