Why do our bodies feel relieved after scratching a mosquito or ant bite?

Question

I have a bite on my toe and can't help scratching it. It gives me relief. Why is that?

Answer 1

At this stage in the game-it is unclear. Pain management (even though this is an itch) is still in its infancy. The one thing I can say is that it seems to be a chemical named capsaisin (the same chemical that give chilies thier heat) that our body makes in some -if not all-pain fibers. Pain fibers are nerves that come in several flavors. Anyway it seems that relief from certain things actially is generated in our brain's dopinergic (another chemical-the same chemical that makes you feel good after eating, going to the bathroom and other things that yor body needs to "reward" you with) area.
Here is the story in a nutshell:Inflammation is a series if chemicals sent out from affected cells that tells your body to swell, vasodilate in one area and constict in another. Itching is just nerve fibers being irritated by all this swelling and everything else. They fire randomly and we feel the itch. Now-I am not going to get into the whole creation/evolution thing here, BUT it is widely accepted by the majority of the medical and nueroscience field that our bodies developed a reponse to things like bugs crawling on our skin (bad news if you were a caveman and trying to survive) so the response that was wired was that of a painful chemical that acts on an unknown area of the swollen areas cells thatsends a signal back to the brain to let it know that everything is ok and it can get back to doing things that the brain does best, like think about things and that kind of stuff. The brain responds back by giving your dopinergic area (deeper in the brain) a little reward for taking care of what it is that is itching you, so you feel good.
Again-all this is theory right now, but it is what is being taught to medical students in thier neuroanatomy classes (or should be according to the board that oversees the US medical licencing exams.

Answer 2

Bizarre as it sounds the reason you feel the relief has to do with how sensations are transmitted from nerve endings to your brain. It turns out that transmission isn't via electrical charge, it is a chemical chain reaction from one nerve cell to the next. This is why your pain reflexes are rather slow. Electricity travels close to speed of light. Chemical chain reactions are much slower.

Back to the relief question. The continuous firing of all the nerves in the chemical reaction actual exhausts the nerve cells, requiring an extended period to recharge. When you scratch, you are firing those nerve cells and overloading the circuit. The relief comes because the recharge period translates into a sensation of no pain. Once the nerves recharge, the itch sensation returns.

Answer 3

Our bodies do not like the saliva in them, and our normal reaction is to swell up at the site of the bite, and begin to itch. The more we scratch the more relieved we get but it actually agitates it more and cuases it to get larger and more itchy.

Answer 4

brilliant question. my best bet is that since the itchiness feeling isnt painful but still irratating we want to do something to relieve ourseleves of it, scratching causes us to forget about the pain within the bit as our body focuses on the painish feeling we are creating by intense scratching...thats why the relief is only temp

Answer 5

May be that while scratching that particular spot heat and pressure is generated which releases the stuff injected in gets quickly allowed to spread to other places thus gets diluted!

Answer 6

Because the saliva of the insect irritates the nerves and if you scratch them, the threshold for pain and itching is raised, thereby decreasing the itch or pain.

Answer 7

Could be a mental relief. By doing something to try and relieve it your mind is saying yes its gone.

Answer 8

scratching interupts the chemical signals that are being released to your brain.

Answer 9

because it itches

Answer 10

scratch when you itch, i say!!!