Starvation - is it really painless?

[Flight Recorder]

My friend and I had an interesting discussion about whether or not starvation was a painful way to die. My position was that it was painful, given the symptoms associated with starvation. But I found this article which states otherwise. However, I am finding it a little hard to stomach.

Anyone with a medical background who can back this up? Is starvation a really "peaceful" way to die (assuming the absence of painkillers)? Would the release of endorphins as the body wastes away really act as an anaesthetic? It just seems to me that it defies logic to suggest that such a process is not painful, but then again, I'm no doctor so I'd like to get the facts.

[Sela]

From what we've been taught in med school, it is certainly far less painful than you'd imagine. Feeling hungry is only a short-term thing; after the first stage of starvation, the body sort of "settles in" for the long haul and the acute painfulness of starvation goes away. When we were discussing a hypothetical case for an elderly man with near-complete colon obstruction due to cancer we had a long discussion regarding palliative care options. After doing research, starvation sounded a lot less bad than it had originally.


That said, every case I've ever looked at deals with the assumption of morphine administration or other anaesthetics/painkillers. I can't speak to how the body would handle it unaided.

[PaperJack]

It is true, starvation only hurts during its first stages. Try not eating for a whole day or two and you'll notice.

[amd52289]

I have to agree with the previous comments. I do a 30-hour Famine and it only hurts for a little bit of course this is different then starvation. If your mind is distracted then I don't think that it is as bad but it is far less painful then other deaths.

[Mayabird]

Of course, there are more pains than just physical pain.
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[Knife]

I don't know if you want to categorize it as 'painful' but slowly wasting away, muscle weakness and loss of mental acuity, can't be fun. You're slowly weakening to atrophy and slowly going crazy till your body just up's and quits. Not painful like being on fire or something, but definitely not nice.

[Einzige]

I tend to fast twice a year or so, usually one in the spring and once again in the fall to burn away any excess fat I'd accumulated over the winter, and again so that I don't look fat in my winter clothes. These periods tend to last between two and three weeks, and I usually eat three times during the course of that period, going four days without and one day with. I'm not sure how close that is to medical starvation, but I've never experienced any pain from it -- at least, I don't associate the feeling of hunger with physical pain. For me it is a quite distinct sensation. As a matter of fact, I've noticed that about three days into a fast I tend to feel more lucid than I had before, though a bit wired.

I'm actually just about to start again before school. I can push it a little, if you'd like.

[Broomstick]

There is a difference between forced starvation against a person's will, voluntary fasting, and lack of eating at the end stages of terminal illness.

People who are dying can stop being hungry. Sometimes they just don't have the urge to eat. It's hard for family to believe sometimes, and has probably let to a lot of forced insertion of feeding tubes, but when someone is mere days from death and the body isn't functioning well the hunger mechanisms don't function well either. They just stop eating. That happened to my mom. She just lost all interest whatsoever in food and never expressed any distress over that. Distress over dying yes, there was some of that, but not over not eating.

This is very different from healthy people starving to death during a famine.

It's also very different from someone choosing to forgo food for several days.

I don't you can directly compare all of the above.