Crawling/tingling sensations

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katwalker
Posts: 25
Joined: Mon Mar 14, 2005 4:01 am

Crawling/tingling sensations

Post by katwalker »

You know, i'm going to post this since it's been bothering me for a while. Many people report that they can feel the demodex mites crawling around and biting them. However, I'm pretty sure that's impossible. The mites are too small to be stimulating your nerves though movement or bites. Lest you disagree, we naturally have all sorts of microscopic critters running around our bodies - inside and out - and we never feel them (collective eeww!).

Now, I know what you're feeling feels as if something is biting you are crawling around because I've felt that too before. In fact, I used to see those Lamasil nail fungus commercials in which the "digger" critter burrows his ways into the nail bed and think, "I feel like that's what's happening on my face!"

However, I think what everyone is feeling is neuropathic pain. In this case, this happens when your skin gets irritated - from mite infestation, histamine reaction to an allergy, from sunburn, from too much friction (e.g., you keep scratching the same spot) - for whatever reason, the nerves get sensitized. When the nerves get overly sensitized, they start firing on their own at random. So, a pain nerve will fire even though there is nothing there to being causing pain. Think of amputess who have "phantom pain." Mild neuropathic pain is felt as itching or crawling (itching is really just a mild stimulation of pressure nerves... BTW, we only have two types of nerve receptors in our skin: temperature and pressure. So everything we "feel" through out skin is some combination of stimulating temperature and pressure nerves.), whereas more severe neuropathic pain is experienced as burning or, well, pain.

So, to sum up: when you feel "crawling," you're not directly feeling the mites. Instead, you're feeling the effects of the irritation the mites have caused on your skin that have led to increased nerve sensitivity to the point that they randomly fire. This is why some people with demodex infestations don't feel any itch or crawling. On the flip side, people may feel "crawling" on their skin and be demodex free. Sacbies is a wonderful example. If infected/infested, you get thousands of scabies partying in your skin before you ever feel it. You don't feel their effects until your body reacts and tries to rid itself of them (all inflammation is the body's attempt to fix something that is wrong).

Similarly, I don't think you'd be able to see a demodex mite bite. They're so tiny in comparison to your face (think about it - several hundred can live in a pore and still not be visable to the naked eye) that a bite would also not be visable. If I understand correctly, the bites are also taking place down inside the pores, not on the surface. So again, what you're seeing is not the bite itself but the inflammation resulting from the bite (or multiple bites).

If someone knows better - I'm the first to admit I'm no expert in skin or mite issues - please correct me. This is just what I know and have deduced through logical reasoning, but I easily could have made errors in this logic. And I'm not jumping on anyone's case; I'm just :twisted: anal :twisted: about things and want the correct information out there, no matter how unimportant (because like this info really changes anything).

-Kat
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