Why scratch back

While this may feel oh so good, the moment you swipe at your skin, you trigger something known as the itch-scratch cycle. Melanie Palm , a board certified dermatologist and cosmetic surgeon. Other than being extremely annoying at 2 a. Adarsh Vijay Mudgil, founder of Mudgil Dermatology , says causes us to scratch.

If you think about it, scratching is a type of pain, yet we rely on it to get rid of an itch. When we scratch, Mudgil says we send low-level pain signals to the brain.

These pain signals temporarily distract the brain from itch. But serotonin also resets the itch signal. In some cases, this can create a never-ending itch-scratch cycle.

To stop the constant need to scratch your scalp, back, or any other area of your body, you need to know why you get itchy in the first place. Various cell types, proteins, and inflammatory mediators are involved. When this happens, local inflammation from cell signaling occurs, and chemicals like histamine and kinins are released.

Hives, irritants, or contact exposures on the skin can lead to a somewhat similar phenomenon as dry skin. Palm says this includes information about any:. Sounds frustrating, right? Well, the good news is there are plenty of ways to stop scratching an itch.

If you know the source of the itch, choosing the right remedy can help speed up the healing process. If skin is dry, Palm says restoring the skin barrier with therapeutic moisturizers is extremely important and can provide fairly quick relief. And if skin is inflamed, Palm says a topical corticosteroid or calcineurin inhibitor may be in order. However, itching while you sleep can sometimes be its own sleep disorder. This issue of scratching oneself while sleeping can be aggravated by having sharp or long fingernails.

If you share a bed with a person, dog, or cat, you could get scratch marks from them during the night. You could also be getting scratched during the day and not noticing the marks until the morning. Scratches from pets, particularly cats, can cause disease. Cats can cause the infection cat scratch fever , which can lead to blistering , fatigue, or fever.

In dermatographia , or skin writing, your skin has an outsized reaction to light scratching, rubbing, or pressure. The skin surrounding scratches, even very light scratches, becomes red and raised. The raised marks will usually go away on their own within 30 minutes or so. This condition is harmless and affects about 2 to 5 percent of the population. The rare skin condition flagellate erythema can sometimes cause scratch-like marks. Rashes from flagellate erythema will often be very itchy.

In most cases, they appear on your back. There are a number of other skin conditions and rashes that could be mistaken for scratch marks, depending on their shape.

Rashes are usually caused by skin contact with some kind of irritant or allergen, or from taking certain medications. Your skin can also break out in hives as an allergic reaction to you eating certain kinds of food. Hives appear as raised bumps or spots, but a cluster of hives could be mistaken for scratches. Severe scratch marks when you wake up could be caused by:.

First, try wearing soft cotton gloves to sleep or filing off the sharp edges from your fingernails. If the scratch marks stop appearing when you wake up, you were likely scratching yourself. If scratching yourself in your sleep is a recurring problem, consider seeing a sleep specialist to diagnose a potential parasomnia. If the scratches still appear after you rule out self-scratching, they could be coming from a person or pet that shares your bed. For the most part, referred itch does no damage, and so it hasn't been particularly well-studied.

One study noted that people who have synesthesia had four times the base level of referred itch, but that study also indicated that only ten percent of the rest of the population had encountered it. Other studies have found that between fifty and ninety percent of people have experienced the phenomenon. There are quite a few theories on what cause the itch. One is simply that, when people develop as embryos, certain nerves branch out more expansively than others.

That would explain why the connected spots on the body are different from person to person. Generally the connected spots are on the arms, legs, and torso, but there are cases of connection between the ear and the throat, or the thumb and the tongue. There's also a theory that damage to the spinocervical pathway, a fast route between the nerves and the brain, might result in hyperactivity of the pathway's neurons.

That, though, would probably produce a body-wide sensation, instead of sensation at discrete sites. In the end, the twin twinges might be the result of the fact that the brain has to pack all the sensations of a large body into a small amount of space.

In the cerebral cortex and the thalamus, both brain areas that deal with touch, regions in charge of the torso and the limbs overlap. A jangled nerve may excite a nearby nerve in the brain - but those two neighboring nerves deal with very different regions of the body.